Ken Hollings

Tiny Orchestra – That’s The Way It Is

2012-01-25T06:36:00.001Z

Tiny Orchestra from Marie Artaker on Vimeo.

This footage of the Tiny Orchestra’s January 11 performance, rather charmingly shot in portrait by Marie Artaker, has recently been posted on Vimeo. More videos should be shot and displayed in this format. Marie broke her leg very recently – we hope she feels better soon and wish her a full and speedy recovery.

The Tiny Orchestra: First And Only Performance

2012-01-15T13:38:00.000Z

At 6.00 pm on the early evening of January 11 2012, an enthusiastic audience had gathered at the end of ‘The Street’ at Central St Martin’s new premises at King’s Cross in order to hear The Tiny Orchestra perform for the first – and last – time. In a short but meditative piece, those with ears to hear and eyes to see with were charmed by artificial dinosaur larynxes made from cardboard and rubber gloves, a soundproofed box containing a silent recording device, a wooden box containing nothing at all, alien metals and resonating junk of various kinds, a ‘latex wind’, an aerosol xylophone, a plastic ‘bubblophone’ and something called a ‘mu-o’, which appeared to be fashioned from a black plastic bin bag. Not since the divine abyss at Bayreuth cleared its throat for the first time have there been sounds like these. As we shall probably never experience their like again, any documentation of the event will be gratefully received and displayed on this blog. The photographs reproduced above come courtesy of Elsa Westreicher, to whom sincere thanks are due.

The Tiny Orchestra: Design and Preparation

2012-01-13T12:51:00.001Z

Over the past two months I have been running a series of studio tutorials with BA Graphic Design students in their final year at Central St Martins. The aim of the ‘Tiny Orchestra’ brief was to create an ensemble of sound instruments and noise-makers that could perform together in a small composition which would reveal the full extent of each instrument’s range – both in terms of tone, timbre and volume. At what stage does a device become a musical instrument? This is a question for interactive designers. A piano, after all, is just an elaborate machine made up of wires and hammers and keys that allows someone to ‘make’ music. The idea was to create an instrument from everyday objects that would be capable of creating interesting noises. Each student had to be able to explain how they arrived at the solution not just in technical terms but also in the design philosophy behind it – for example, does an instrument necessarily have to be loud? Or tuneful? Might it not also interact with other media: colours, lights, words, movements? And if so, how? I was very impressed by the inventiveness and enthusiasm which the students brought to the Tiny Orchestra – some of their solutions were quite ingenious. The pictures taken above give some flavour of the some of the interim sessions during which the students prepared themselves for a live public performance, which will be documented in a supplementary post. The photographs offer silent testimony to an exuberant and audible experience – which therefore requires no further comment from me.

‘Cage Post-Cage’ Posted on Vimeo

2012-01-09T17:30:00.002Z

Ken Hollings on the legacy of John Cage from Sound and Music on Vimeo.

This seems like as good a way as any to start 2012: Sound and Music have finally posted the film made of my lecture ‘The Realization That We Possess Nothing: Some Thoughts on Cage – Post Cage’ on Vimeo. This talk was delivered almost a year ago at the Playhouse Theatre in Whitstable the morning after a man threw himself out of the window next to mine at the hotel in which I was staying – those who wish to refresh their memories of that grim and strange event so click here. Otherwise sit back and enjoy this rather fine video, which benefits from a two-camera set up in the theatre and the relatively long time it has spent in post-production - good to see that none of it was wasted over getting my name spelled correctly on the main title. My thanks to everyone involved.

See also:
‘Cage Post Cage’ Lecture at Off the Page Festival
Backstage with Dave Tomkins at ‘Off the Page’

Wyrd Scenes at Luminous Books this Christmas

2011-12-22T12:52:00.002Z

It took more than a week to put together a post commemorating the launch of Wyrd Tales 2 at Luminous Books last Saturday, but only because I spent almost that long sorting through Sarah Sparkes’excellent photographic documentation of the event. Coordinated by the most reverend English Heretic, the launch began in an unexpected cascade of sparks, courtesy of the kustom kar kommando grinding the door panel of an old ice-cream truck outside the bookshop entrance – judging by the effort he was putting it into, it will be the bitchin’-est hot rod Mr Whippy North East London has ever seen. Inside the shop, the walls were resplendent with Wyrd Tales 2 artwork by the likes of Lisa Cradduck, Dean Kenning, Phil Legard and Sarah Sparkes. The evening itself included readings from the new anthology by English Heretic on the highly seasonal topic of ritualistic mass suicide and Norfolk ornithological observation, Mark Fisher on M R James, Brian Eno and undetected landmarks, plus my own reading of an extract from ‘The Storm Towers of Atlantis’, the full text of which can be found between the covers of Wyrd Tales 2. In this pleasurable endeavour I was abetted by Mark Pilkington of Indigo Octagon, whose usual number had been halved by an outbreak of pre-Santacon 2011 flu, tweaking some amazing electronic sounds of his circuit boards, plus a large-scale projection of Phil Legrand’s outstanding cover art for my story. His Turner-esque rendering of a giant crab claw breaking the waves continues to haunt my dreams. My heartfelt appreciation goes out to everyone involved in a night that absolutely refused in every way to communicate the true meaning of Christmas – I humbly salute you all.

Copies of Wyrd Tales 2 are currently available from the English Heretic Souvenir Shop, but stocks are dwindling fast.

Pictured above from top to bottom: Confused spirits gathering on a Christmas night (left to right) Mark Fisher, KH, Mark Pilkington, English Heretic; English Heretic presents First Reports of a Tantric Death Cult at Ganges; Mark Fisher reads from his essay ‘Bleak and Solemn…’ The Hauntological Landscapes of MR James; Mark Pilkington watched over by spirits of the deep; KH with Mark Pilkington of Indigo Octagon present The Storm Towers of Atlantis; KH threatened by a giant crab claw – all photographs by the splendid Sarah Sparkes.

Note: As well as supplying an excellent gallery space, Luminous Books also specializes in artist publications together with a select range of vintage second-hand volumes covering a wide subject area, and is therefore worthy of your custom and support – so start 2102 by subscribing to their RSS feed.

Welcome to Mars now on Kindle

2011-12-14T12:11:00.000Z

I am pleased to announce that Welcome to Mars is Strange Attractor’s first book to be converted to the Kindle e-book format. There are plans to make it available in an e-pub version soon. In the meantime, please remember that Christmas is not just a time for giving things but also a time for buying them as well.

Welcome to Mars is available via Amazon US at $6.99 or from Amazon UK at £5.99.

A remarkable book… quite simply, essential reading.

Fortean Times

Welcome To Mars draws upon newspaper accounts, advertising campaigns, declassified government archives, old movies and newsreels from this unique period when the future first took on a tangible presence. Ken Hollings depicts an unsettled time in which the layout of Suburbia reflected atomic bombing strategies, bankers and movie stars experimented with hallucinogens, brainwashing was just another form of interior decoration and strange lights in the sky were taken very seriously indeed.

Ken Hollings shows brilliantly how the extraordinary web of technologies that drove the Cold War have shaped not just our culture but the very way we think of ourselves as human beings. Welcome to Mars offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of the roots of the strange humanoid culture we live in today.

Adam Curtis

Seamlessly interweaving developments in technology, popular culture, politics, changes in home life, the development of the self, collective fantasy and overwhelming paranoia, Hollings has produced an alarming and often hysterically funny vision of the past that would ultimately govern all of our futures.

On The Golden Stairs

2011-12-12T09:42:00.002Z

Earlier this month I gave a talk at Tate Britain as part of their evening event for December 2. I was invited to talk about any painting I liked in their historic collection and decided upon The Golden Stairs by the Pre-Raphaelite painter and illustrator, Edward Coley Burne-Jones. One of the most enigmatic canvasses hanging in Tate Britain’s main gallery, it is not a work that gives up its meaning readily – nor will any amount of analysis or discussion exhaust its possibilities. Even now I find the painting intriguing and evasive – a fin-de-siècle enigma that anticipates the structural dynamics of the flat plane as revealed in modernist art while at the same time seeking to escapee the base materialism of the modern age. A depiction of perpetual motion that gently echoes the time and motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge, The Golden Stairs is simultaneously a magical working and a conceptual artwork that seeks in my opinion to capture the wayward rhythms of thought itself. As we rediscover modernism is a variety of interdisciplinary practices that continues to this day – postmodernism being but a brief hiatus in a longer, more complex and subtler process – the undiscovered and ambiguous beauties of Burne-Jones’s art will become increasingly important. ‘Only this is true,’ the painter wrote, ‘that beauty is very beautiful, and softens and comforts and inspires, and rouses and lifts up and never fails.’

The photo series reproduced comes courtesy of Daily Planet roving shutterbug Kitty Keen, to whom respectful and profound thanks are due. The Golden Stairs is clearly visible behind KH in the top three perspectives.

English Heretic present Wyrd Tales 2 – launch event and synopsis

2011-12-07T08:35:00.003Z

English Heretic is delighted to announce the delivery of Wyrd Tales 2: a salvaged miscegenation of occult pulp, speculative meta-fiction, neolithic fantasy and mythic sci-fi. Wyrd Tales 2 will transport you to the horrific record collections of R'lyeh and the submerged libraries of a comic book Crowley. Within its lurid pages, futuristic crab men crawl and the Machiavellian spectre of Joe Kennedy plots. Reports come in from the east coast of radical cannibal cults, we scry the haunted inner cinema of Norfolk beaches and shamanic lights are seen in ancient Britain's aeyr ways. Featuring contributions by a renowned and talented roster of guest artists and writers together with a CD of aural lagan, Wyrd Tales 2, promises to provide the magical vehicle for an archetypal voyage to England’s deep.

Luminous Books have kindly invited English Heretic to launch Wyrd Tales 2 at their shop on Saturday December 10th. The evening will include annotated readings by contributors, DJ sets, libations and a chance to purchase copies of the book and CD.
From 7.00pm till 10.30pm.
For more details clich here.

Luminous Books
3-5, Frederick Terrace E8 4EW

Performances and talks by:
Ken Hollings – The Storm Towers of Atlantis (with musical backing by Indigo Octagon)
Mark Fisher – Bleak and solemn... the hauntological landscapes of M.R. James
English Heretic – First Reports Of A Tantric Death Cult At Ganges
DJ sets by Dean Brannagan
Display of Art from Wyrd Tales 2.

Wyrd Tales 2! Art and writing by Lisa Cradduck, Mark Fisher, English Heretic, Ken Hollings, Dean Kenning, Phil Legard, Mark Pilkington and Sarah Sparkes. Available in the English Heretic souvenir shop from 12th December.
Cost £14 UK, £16 Rest Of The World
Book Contents (140 pages full colour)
Wyrd – in poetry, theory and practice
Planet of the spiders
The Dunwich tapes
Heuristic catalogues: A.W.D.R.E.Y Recordings
The Storm Towers of Atlantis
Skyline
‘Bleak and solemn...’ the hauntological landscapes of M.R. James
First reports of a Tantric death cult At Ganges

CD Contents (41min) comes in Digipak featuring: The Dunwich Mix Tapes
Cover collage by Sarah Sparkes
CD artwork by Lisa Cradduck

After Haussmann: ‘There’s A Riot Goin’ On’

2011-12-06T08:45:00.002Z

Held at central St Martins imposing new site at Kings Cross on the evening of Thursday, December 1 There’s a Riot Going On, Design Against Crime’s symposium on the social unrest of the summer had as its subtext ‘Gang Crime, X Factor Generation and the Dark Side of Shopping’. It was an intense and discomforting affair – as the holding of any political debate where we have been encouraged not to see one is always likely to be. There seemed to be two clear positions on this particularly complex issue. The first is that the riots can – and should – be understood in more conventional political terms but that it’s more convenient for those in authority to depict them as just another form of pure criminality, trivialized by the violent looting of brand names and consumer goods. The second is that the consumer goods themselves constitute an arena of political activity in an age when conventional political rhetoric and analysis have both been played out. In other words, it is all about raiding Foot Locker but on a far deeper level than we are prepared to imagine at the moment. An account posted on the Design Inspiration blog gives a broader outline of the event which, although fair, somewhat sidesteps this issue. Shopping is now an antisocial activity in and of itself – but one that also involves the entire polis at the same time. Haussmann’s modernization of Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century took care of that: a conspiracy of private finance, state governance and architectural order in which – to use Haussmann’s own words – ‘geometry and graphic design play a more important role than architecture itself’.

Over the course of the event Gavin Knight spoke eloquently about the power structures and social collapse surrounding gang life in London, Manchester and Glasgow; journalist Suzanne Moore presented a severe and witty critique of the way in which the riots were presented by press, police and politicians; while the chair David Matthews kept asking all the right questions. Richard Thomas from Resonance 104.4 FM was on hand to record the whole thing for some future broadcast. Personally I found the contributions from the audience during the final part of the evening to the most enlightening part of the whole symposium and even went so far as to switch my microphone off so that I wouldn’t be tempted to stop listening to what they had to say. It was a useful and enlightening debate and one that is urgently needed at the moment – I hope it proves to only the first of many more.

Pictured above: inside the venue; one of the flat screen displays in the auditorium; Gavin Knight speaking; KH presents ‘After Haussmann’; the audience; KH, David Matthews and Gavin Knight listen intently while Suzanne Moore speaks at the panel discussion – photographs courtesy of the Daily Planet’s roving shutterbug Kitty Keen.

Tate Britain ‘Rehang’ Lecture This Friday

2011-11-29T19:45:00.001Z

On Friday December 2 I am giving a short talk as part of this month’s Late at the Tate: Rehang event. The evening starts at 6.00 pm and I will be speaking at about 7.00 pm. I have selected one of the key works in the historic collection as my subject – but you will have to come along to find out which one. Admission is free, and there is a pay bar – which also means that it is the perfect way to spend the first Friday of the Christmas month. I hope to see you there.

Live From The Resonance 104.4 FM Studio With My Cat Is An Alien

2011-11-26T10:30:00.002Z

Ghosts can’t help themselves: they are always where they have to be, not where they want to be – flickering in and out of our perceptions as a series of hesitations, slips of the tongue and linguistic mistakes. The more self-conscious the public were rendered by the encroaching presence of recordings in their lives, the less likely they were to acknowledge the existence of an interior voice. The drama of the ‘all too human’ had to be inferred from its involuntary pauses, hesitations and repetitions: we have been on the alert for the presence of ghosts ever since.

- extract from Ghost Blood Spectrum text

Performing live to air with My Cat Is An Alien and Romana Ponzini was an exhilarating experience; and ‘Ghost Blood Spectrum’ was as intense an assemblage of sounds and texts as I could have wished for. The photos reproduced above were taken just before or during the actual broadcast and convey some sense of the moment. My thanks to everyone involved, especially the studio staff at Resonance 104.4 FM who could not have been more professional or supportive.

Pictured above: Ramona with Japanese percussion; Maurizio Opalio with guitar; Maurizio and Roberto Opalio with guitars and Space Toys; Roberto Opalio at the piano and producer Mark Robins at the controls; Maurizio Opalio tweaking the amplifier; Maurizio Opalio (with camera), Ramona Ponzini (with camera) and Roberto Opalio (with Polaroid camera) – a study in visual harmony

See also:
Live Broadcast with My Cat Is An Alien on Resonance 104.4 FM
My Cat Is Alien Artworks and Projects
Wire Spiral Arm Features My Cat Is Alien
In The Studio With My Cat Is An Alien

Public Lecture At Central St Martins’ Kings Cross Site

2011-11-22T08:03:00.001Z

On the evening of Thursday December 1, I will be giving a lecture as part of this event organized by Design Against Crime at Central St Martins’ new Kings Cross site. The evening is open to the public, but you do need to reserve a place in advance by clicking here. I hope you can all make it.

Live Broadcast With My Cat Is An Alien on Resonance 104.4 FM

2011-11-17T19:10:00.006Z

On the evening of Wednesday, November 23 between 20.00 hrs and 21.00 hrs [UK time] I will be presenting ‘Ghost Blood Spectrum’ a live radio event for voices, texts, music and sounds created in collaboration with My Cat Is An Alien and Ramona Ponzini. I am of course really looking forward to meeting up with Maurizio, Roberto and Ramona in London, where they will be playing a two-day residency at Café Oto. Regular readers of this blog will not need to be informed about MCIAA’s unique approach to the art of performance – or indeed Ramona Ponzini’s dynamic take on the delivery of Japanese poetry. I have no idea what will happen or even what it will all sound like – but what I do know from previous experiences on Planet Turin is that it will be primordial and strange…and uncommonly great. You can follow proceedings either by tuning into 104.4 FM or by tapping into the live feed by clicking here.

See also:
My Cat Is Alien Artworks and Projects
Wire Spiral Arm Features My Cat Is Alien
In The Studio With My Cat Is An Alien

Pictured above: an experiment in time travel involving KH, Ramona Ponzini, Roberto and Maurizio Opalio conducted after midnight at the Café Fiorno, Turin – there is no credit for this photograph as it hasn’t actually been taken yet.

The Sum of All Fears at the Bishopsgate Institute

2011-11-12T09:45:00.004Z

If ‘The Fear Factor’ panel at the Bishopsgate Institute proved anything at all, it was that fear itself is not a single-issue subject. The conversation ranged from violent hallucinations to violence in the home, networked experience to the trolls that seem to inhabit the network, and from lies and damned lies to statistics and Daily Mail headlines. Julie Bindel spoke of fear as a means of social control, while David Aaronvitch described the terror of losing control of what appears to be your innate rationality. Timandra Harkness exploded a few stochastic myths about our life expectancy, while I explored the distributed paranoia built into our current media architecture. Throughout the proceedings Neil Denny of Little Atoms maintained control of the group with a clenched iron fist, which is as it should be. Listen out for details on the forthcoming podcast of the event. All Hail Little Atoms – and All Hail the Bishopsgate Institute!

Pictured from top to bottom – the library set up for the panel; Julie Bindel and David Aaronovitch; KH and Timandra Harkness; the panel in full effect with Neil Denny presiding; a message from our sponsor displayed in the institute’s main reception area.

The Fear Factor

2011-11-06T12:37:00.003Z

I am taking part in a panel discussion at the Bishopsgate Institute on the evening of Thursday November 10. Part of their ‘Whose Mind Is It Anyway?’ series, co-curated with Little Atoms, it should be a lively if disturbing affair – at least if I have anything to do with it. Do come along if you can.

These details are from the Bishopgate’s online posting:

Terrorism, health, poverty, safety, change or simply the unknown are all genuine and valid fears in today's society. They affect our behaviour, our choices and potentially our values. From the insurance industry to increased security control, fear has the power to alter our daily behaviour and to persuade us to accept policies and practises that may otherwise have been unpalatable. Who or what generates fear? Are there social or economic benefits to a frightened society? And if so, could the generation of fear be intentional?

In this discussion our panellists will explore what creates fear, how this alters our behaviour and values, and whether fear itself is cultivated.
Speakers include David Aaronovitch (writer and broadcaster), Julie Bindel (journalist), Ken Hollings (writer) and Timandra Harkness (writer and comedian). The event will be chaired by Neil Denny (Little Atoms)

Full details:
10 November 2011
7:30 PM
Price £8 Concs £6
Online booking offer

Pictured above: KH happily contemplating the prospect of a life at sea, captured by roving shutterbug Kitty Keen – ‘Astonishing voyagers! What splendid stories/We read in your eyes as deep as the seas!’ (Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Voyage’)

Bookworm presents ‘The Art of Worms’

2011-10-29T12:54:00.002+01:00

After the launch event comes the book itself… The Tapeworm announces its new publishing venture, The Bookworm, with a tidy compendium of its cover art, alongside a specially commissioned essay by writer Ken Hollings…

TBW#01 - The Art of Worms
The first publication from The Bookworm
Contents:
“Parasitic Infestation”, an essay by Ken Hollings.

Illustrations from the first 25 Tapeworm tapes, including works by SavX, Derek Jarman and Leif Elggren.
Cover illustration: Savage Pencil.
66pp, 110mm x 117mm, soft cover, thread bound booklet – no ISBN.
Edition of 250 copies only.
Printed on Munken Print stock
Typeset in Aldine 401, Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and Miso

You can find all the ordering information at the Touch shop by clicking here.

See also: Worm Eats Bear: A Special Evening Just for You from the Tapeworm

Pictured above: The Art of Worms, plus a view of KH at the mike from The Worm Eats Bear event, October 20, 2011, courtesy of the i-Wyrm.

The Tapeworm Turns

2011-10-21T11:57:00.000+01:00

You couldn’t pick the venue out from any of the other post-industrial firetraps currently passing for gallery and performance spaces on major land masses from Brooklyn to Berlin – although the toilet cubicle knocked together from plywood boards at the back of the room would certainly have made Henry David Thoreau blush with pride. The evening itself, however, could not have been more special: Worm Eats Bear was a series of short, tightly focussed pieces from artists closely associated with the Tapeworm cassette-only label and audiovisual publishing powerhouse Touch. I was there to read my introductory essay to The Art of Worms, a 100-page booklet containing reproductions of the cover art from the first twenty-five tapes released by Tapeworm. It is a truly handsome volume, and I shall be plugging it relentlessly in future posts; but meanwhile, here is your chance to enjoy some of the sights sounds and, yes, the smells of a remarkable night.

Pictured from top to bottom: Michael Esposito communes with Edgar Allen Poe and the spirits of angels; Mike Harding and C M von Hausswolff hail the conquering worm, Joachim Nordwall gets serious; BJ Nilsen gets his game on; Edwin Pouncey, Peter Hope-Evans and the Veiled Lady of Harmonia bring some quiet dignity to the proceedings; and KH throws shade while reading ‘Parasitic Infestation’ as photographed by Mike Harding.

Worm Eats Bear – A Special Evening Just For You from the Tapeworm

2011-10-12T18:20:00.003+01:00

The following information is currently being circulated by my good friends at Touch – I hope to see you at this fascinating event taking place on the evening of October 20:

Announcing a special evening of Bankside performances curated by The Tapeworm, as part of the Merge Festival. London’s finest cassette-only label, The Tapeworm, presents its third annual event in the Capital. Exemplary music and much excitement is to be expected from a line-up of the label’s mates.

Mr Ken Hollings, a writer of note, shall be reading his text from the first Bookworm publication, to be launched on this very same night. Sweden’s BJ Nilsen will be flying in and making a splendid noise for you all. A second Swede, CM von Hausswolff (...he’s a king, dontchaknow!) will share a stage with Touch’s Mike Harding in a reading of Edgar Allen Poe like none before. Cult vs. occult — former Medicine Head man Peter Hope-Evans and illustrator Savage Pencil will whip up a dark blue storm. Mr Pencil’s fine drawings will also be on display — exhibition continues 21st to 23rd October, 12 to 6pm. Hopping on the bus from Elephant & Castle is zerocrop and his band; pop perfection from a local lad. And finally, a London eye — video installation by Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us.

Date: 20.10.11. Time: 7pm – 10.30pm.
Free entry. The Bear Pit, Bear Gardens, London SE1 9EB.

You can download a PDF of the flyer for this event by clicking here – the illustration is by Savage Pencil (who else?)

‘Activate Only When Absolutely Necessary’ Now Available Online

2011-10-09T03:59:00.001+01:00

Utopia is merely a temporary hoarding where such coming attractions are fly posted for the future. The scraps and remnants overlap each other: a forgotten snatch of library music, some frames from a promotional film, laboratory test footage, a moment at a trade fair or a flash of text from a television commercial. When the pieces fit together, we call it progress. When they don’t, we rely upon a filmmaker like Mika Taanila to make stories out of them.

A download of ‘Activate Only When Absolutely Necessary’, my essay on the extraordinary films of Finnish artist Mika Taanila is currently available from the online archive for doCUMENTA 13. It can be accessed by clicking here. Originally written for the catalogue accompanying ‘Human Engineering’, Taanila’s 2006 show at the Migros Museum in Zurich, it offers a retrospective overview of failed futures as documented in his work. It is a still from A Physical Ring, one of Mika;s films, that graces the cover of Welcome To Mars – soon to be made available as an eBook from Strange Attractor Press – more on this exciting development in due course. In the meantime, please feel to enjoy this little piece of the past – where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

Pictured above: front cover of the ‘Human Engineering’ catalogue, Migros Museum, 2006

Nude Bares All – Never Has To Say Goodbye

2011-10-01T11:35:00.002+01:00

‘From lowbrow art to indie crafting, via street art, outsider art, comics, illustration, cult fiction, outré architecture, indie crafting, photography, indie and underground film, tiki, burlesque, designer toys, steampunk and leftfield music… Nude covered it all over the course of seventeen fabulously eclectic issues.’

Suzy Prince and Ian Lowie have just announced that Nude Magazine is about to walk out of our lives but will be doing so in the style to which we have become accustomed. Publication of this classy little rag will cease for good after issue 17 – but to make sure we never forget its many charms, Suzy and Ian have also produced Bare Essentials: the Best of Nude Magazine. This toothsome nugget brings together some of the best articles published by Nude during its seven-year existence as a lively, international indie and counterculture magazine. I was very pleased to be associated with Nude as Ian and Suzy always proved to be enthusiastic and sensitive people to work with, both as publishers and editors – and so I am delighted to discover that my piece on Coney Island, ‘Babylon by the Sea’, from Nude Issue Ten, has found a place in Bare Essentials. Also included in its 176 pages are five new features and a bonus sixteen-page insert produced in conjunction with some of the finest design wonks at Central St Martins. Add interviews with Charles Burns, Jamie Reid, Alan Moore and John Waters, plus articles on the Futuro House, British Horror Movies and Blythe Doll Portraiture among the delights on offer, and you’ve got yourself a hell of a deal there, friends.

Bare Essentials: The Best of Nude Magazine 2003-2011
Dimensions: 250 x 210 mm
Extent:176 pages plus cover
Full colour throughout
Plus a free sixteen-page insert featuring interpretations of Nude article by graphics students at London’s prestigious and internationally-renowned Central St Martins College
ISBN: 978-0-9569059-0-1
Published Cover Price: £14.99.
Buy Now for just £11.50 (plus p&p)
Published: 15 October 2011

See also:
Catching Up With Coney Island
In Memoriam Joe Rollino 1905-2009

From Damien Thorn To Michael Jackson – A Thames Walk

2011-09-23T11:44:00.004+01:00

By all accounts, All Saints Fulham seems a friendly and picturesque church located on the northern bank of the Thames right by Putney Bridge. They celebrate Eucharist three times a week, the churchyard is prettily laid out, and you can watch the tops of red London buses as they cruise from one side of the river to the other. There will of course always be those who spoil the whole impression by pointing out that this is also the place where national treasure Patrick Troughton gets a lightening rod through the chest as The Priest in 1976 satanic shocker The Omen. One balmy summer morning I found myself under the All Saints church tower staring up at that same lightning rod in the company of the Wellcome Library’s Ross MacFarlane. It was at his prompting, in fact, that I took the brooding shot reproduced at the top of the photographic sequence above.

We had actually come in search of Al Fayed’s notorious statue of Michael Jackson which is now located in the grounds of Fulham Football Club rather than the tasteful confines of Harrods, where it was no doubt originally intended to distract visitors at the Princess Diana votary shrine. Pilgrims will always need some sort of entertainment, so it seemed appropriate that Ross and I should retain the memory of a hell-born child sent to earth to do his master’s secret bidding as we made our way along the river, past neatly arranged Victorian parks and down shaded avenues of trees, in search of Michael. Like all sites of pilgrimage, this one comes with a price – you have to pay for an official guided tour of the entire stadium if you want to see the statue. To be honest, £5.00 seems a small price to pay to see this extraordinary memorial – especially if you think the recent work of Jake and Dinos Chapman has been less of a challenge than you’d like. Words cannot fully express the glib funerary horror of this monument to fame, mortality and sentiment. The scale alone provokes a profound sense of nausea: at seven feet tall it is too large to be comfortably life-sized and way too small to be imposing. The raised arm with its gloved fist actually seems to have developed some extra joint hitherto undetected in the human shoulder – Ross assured me that there is nothing in the Wellcome to rival it. And yet there he is: Michael Jackson, round the backend of a football stadium staring out across the Thames while in the throes of some unspecified act of entertainment.

Those who wish to re-enact the thrill of spying on Michael Jackson need only walk around the front of Fulham Football Grounds, take the first turning on your left and then pass along a wall that is green with age until you reach the river again. You will now find yourself in a small park with one raised corner diagonally opposite the rear gates of the Riverside Stand. Climb up on this raised corner, and Michael will appear to you. To see him surrounded by security fencing, locked gates and CCTV cameras – as detailed in the middle two photographs – is to have a unique experience of fame as it currently exists in the twenty-first century. To complete the moment, a small group of Japanese children showed up to gaze in wonder at their idol. It was certainly worth the journey: from demon child to child star. Where to go next? Hammersmith, which lies just a little further down the Thames path? ‘You’ll see me in hell, Mr Thorn,’ replied the Priest. ‘There we will share out our sentence.’

See also:
Michael Jackson: A New Face in Hell for 2010
Utter Trash: The Resistible Rise of Michael Jackson Denounced by Fan
The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (They Don’t Really Care About Us)
Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley
Michael Jackson Was Always Good To Me

We’re Living In This World Now – Catching Up With Ground Zero

2011-09-12T15:53:00.002+01:00

We were married at 3.30 in the afternoon on 13 October 2001, police surveillance helicopters circling overhead. We danced for part of the night and then caught our flight to New York the next morning. The departure lounge was almost empty; and they were only using plastic cutlery in all the bars, cafés and eating areas.
There were a lot of empty seats on the plane too.
Looking back, I can see that it was the blind faith we had in ourselves and in the plans we’d made during the summer that was now taking us to New York. We arrived at the UN Plaza Hotel around ten at night and asked a woman at reception if we could see the swimming pool up on the 39th floor, just so we could find it again early the next morning.
‘The pool is closed right now,’ the woman said, ‘but sure, you can go up and have a look around. Someone should still be there.’
All we could see at night as we walked through glass-walled corridors to the pool area were the lights of midtown Manhattan arranged all around us like a universe of stars. An attendant in a white T-shirt and blue overalls was swabbing down the tiles over on the far side of the swimming area, a flattened panorama of darkness and light stretching out behind him.
He looked up at us.
‘They said in reception it would be OK for us to look around.’
Trailing a long white cable through the water, a robot pool cleaner shaped like a small mechanical turtle was working its way across the bottom of the pool towards the deep end. The attendant smiled and leaned on his mop.
‘Sure, go right ahead,’ he said. ‘Heck of a view, isn’t it?’
He spread an arm to indicate the starry expanse behind him.
‘Incredible,’ we said.
The robot pool cleaner continued its journey beneath the silent blue water.
‘They’ll build ’em back up again, you know?’ the attendant suddenly said. ‘They’ll build ’em up again for sure.’
‘You mean…’
He nodded his head vigorously.
‘See that light?’ he said and pointed towards a white glow on the horizon, just beyond the office lights of midtown Manhattan. ‘They’re working there right now.’
Oh my god, my god.
‘They’ll build them again,’ he said. ‘Sure to.’
He sounded so certain of what he was saying that it was hard not to believe him. He might even have been right just then and that was what they were planning to do. But even so, all we knew was that we were married now and together, and it felt as though we were walking among the stars.

The above text is taken from ‘Everything Is Going Extremely Well’, a short story of mine that appeared in issue 6 of Succour Magazine – ‘The Future’. It is a pretty accurate account of what Rachel and I first encountered in Manhattan in October of 2001. The story actually ended there, so it doesn’t mention the anthrax scare that was taking up all the news headlines at the time or the plane that crashed near Rockaway Beach, or the dump trucks filled with sand and rubble at the end of practically every main street, or the armed state troopers, and the humvees parked up high on the sidewalks, or indeed the fire trucks that would come chasing down the avenues, lights flashing and flags flying – everyone would stop and cheer as one went by. The story also does not include – and not many accounts can do full justice to – what it was like to visit Ground Zero in the weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers. The area was cordoned off, but that didn’t stop a huge press of people from filling the side streets and open areas in the immediate vicinity. The air was dark and smelled of burning – you felt toxic just breathing it in – and everywhere there was this low murmuring of voices as if no one dared to speak too loudly. It felt like we were all crowded together in some vast open-air cathedral. Rachel and I hadn’t gone there with the intention of taking photographs, but in the end there was no other response left open to you but to do so. Confronted by so much sorry and despair and by your own sense of individual helplessness, there was at least some refuge in lifting a camera to your eye and clicking a button. The above are just a few of the pictures we took, and they pretty much capture both the feeling and the moment.

Catching Up With Karlheinz Stockhausen, New York and 9/11

2011-09-09T14:57:00.001+01:00

The Reverend Sirs at the Hauntological Society blog have just posted the full transcript a text of mine, ‘Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Outer Universe and Me’, which details the story of how Stockhausen and I ended up being photographed together outside a mobile recording studio in the spring of 1999. Originally published in the catalogue for the 2002 Sydney Biennale, it links the two of us with the events of 9/11 through speculations on the future of space travel, a Kurdish street demonstration in Cologne and a missing copy of Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger. In reflecting on my reasons for writing this account the way I did in 2002, I found myself returning once again to the day in October 2001 when Rachel, the love of my life, and I got married: after a lot of thought we had decided to stick with our original plan of honeymooning in New York. Barely a month after the attack on the World Trade Centre, it was a very different city from the one we had visited the previous year and where we had first decided to become husband and wife. In a forthcoming post on this blog I hope to share with you some of the photographs we took of the crowds and barriers at Ground Zero during our stay. In the meantime here are two views of Manhattan in early October 2001, where the buildings and streets really did seem that empty: taken together, they tell their own story.

See also: A Memory for Stockhausen Day

My Cat Is An Alien Artworks and Projects

2011-09-04T11:20:00.001+01:00

As a pictorial supplement to my account of my recent encounter with My Cat Is An Alien in their Turin studio, as featured on the cover of the September issue of The Wire, I am posting some more of the photographs I took during the course of the interview. Originally intended to form a pictorial notebook to help me keep track of the prodigious amount of artwork, archives and assemblages on display in their Alien Studio, these snapshots help to illustrate further some of the themes and preoccupations discussed in my conversation with Roberto and Maurizio Opalio.

Pictured from top to bottom: assemblages of Polaroid pictures taken onstage during MCIAA performances with accompanying cassette recordings hanging above various items from their Space Toy collection; the large wire model of Camillo, the Opalio Brothers’ original alien cat, used onstage during their first concert appearances, opening for Sonic Youth in 1998; a page from one of Roberto’s albums of photographs documenting Turin’s old industrial sector – if it’s featured here, the building probably doesn’t exist anymore; handmade cover art for the strictly limited-edition vinyl version of From the Earth To the Spheres, a series of collaborations with (among others) Thurston Moore, Jim O’Rourke, and Christian Marclay with Okyung Lee; one of a folio of drawings made high in the Western Alps by Maurizio Opalio which he coloured using pigments taken from mountain flowers; the head and shoulders of the life-size wire Alien figure, the star of Light_Earth_Blue_Silver, Roberto Opalio’s 35-minute ‘dual film’ shot on a 8mm handheld cine camera.

See also:
Wire Spiral Arm features My Cat Is An Alien on Cover
In the Studio with My Cat Is An Alien

Blow Up at the V2: ‘Every Artist, a Journalist’

2011-08-31T09:39:00.002+01:00

Earlier this month the V2 Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam staged an event provocatively titled ‘Every Artist, a Journalist’ – a concept whose implications are not entirely alien to this blog, although journalism by its very nature is incapable of adopting the kind of longer perspectives required for an actual change of mind. Taking part alongside Lino Hellings and Alfredo Cramerotti was Gair Dunlop, whose film study of life around the Dounreay reactors Atom Town was recently screened at the Arts Catalyst Studio in London. Click here to watch a fascinating video of the Dunlop, Hellings and Cramerotti in conversation on the subject of aesthetics and reportage, secrets and reality in an exchange that was originally broadcast live via the V2 website.

To accompany the release of Atom Town, I wrote a short essay on the subject of nuclear architecture, both cinematic and institutional, that was subsequently published in a handsome foldout brochure available at screenings. This essay, ‘Temporary Storage: Notes on the Dounreay Fast Reactor, Citadel of the Future’ has now been included in a special V2 e-reader, alongside contributions from Alfredo Cramerotti, Michelle Kasprzak, Mark Nash and Alexei Shulgin, available for download for free in various formats (MOBI, Kindle etc), including PDF. Meanwhile a PDF of the original film brochure, featuring Gair Dunlop’s gorgeous post-atomic photographic studies of the Dounreay interior, can still be had simply by clicking here. This has been a public service announcement – now clear the halls and go about your business in a quiet and orderly manner.

Wire Spiral Arm features My Cat Is An Alien on its Cover

2011-08-28T13:59:00.001+01:00

The September edition of The Wire is now on the newsstands with Roberto and Maurizio Opalio of My Cat Is An Alienon its cover. Inside you will find an extended account of my trip to their studio in Turin which took place earlier this summer. I am now back from my summer wanderings and hope to be posting some more images from this visit in the coming days, including some of Roberto’s own amazing photographs.

Related posts:
In the Studio with My Cat Is An Alien
Catching Up With Nietzsche in Turn
Catching Up With Dario Argento’s ‘Profondo Rosso’ in Turin

Mail-Order Trash

2011-08-04T12:45:00.003+01:00

Trash has traditionally been seen as the unnecessary by-product of progress: the further we advance, the more trash we generate. But what about the discarded trash of our popular culture? All our bad ideas and mistakes that continue to fascinate us so – and fascination is always a sure sign you’re going to hate yourself in the morning…

In an attempt to placate our bad consciences we try to make an aesthetic out of ‘recycling’, which becomes the return to some undifferentiated material nirvana in which things are neither one thing nor another, distinct from each other, but the suspended – that is ‘sustainable’ – expression of a process. Suppose for one moment, however, that the hidden thinking behind this process has a psychology to it for which we are not yet prepared…

King Ludwig II of Bavaria had made plans for all his castles to be blown up after his death, so no one else could look at them – fortunately his palaces were spared and the masses are allowed to visit this extravagant Wagnerian Disneyland he created of swans and princes, grottoes, halls and artificial waterfalls – expressions of conspicuous waste…

I am pleased to announce that the catalogue accompanying April’s Pretty - Ugly event is now available by mail order from Hato Press on extremely reasonable terms. A twisted and debauched compilation that would still be ravishingly cheap at twice the price, it reproduces – in gold ink no less – an early draft of my ‘Rough Notes Towards The Psychoanalysis of Trash’: a preliminary study for a new work in progress. Make some poor kids happy this summer and order a copy today. Details as follows:

Pretty—Ugly was a series of events organised by the second year students of MA Communication design at Central Saint Martins. “Pretty ugly” is a casual phrase and a paradox imbued with a range of subtexts: aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, desire and repulsion, interest and disinterest, polish and sincerity… Through workshops, an exhibition, a series of talks and an auction, we sought to raise a critical discussion on the subject of contemporary “undesign.”

Author: Various
Editors: Angela Pescolderung, Hana Tanimura, Isabel Sierra y Gómez de Leon, Jens Dan Johansen, Shi Yuan
Publishers: (Same as above)
Designers: Hana Tanimura, Jens Dan Johansen, Shi Yuan
Pages: 100pp (50 sheets) plus a 20pp booklet-insert
Dimensions: A5 (148 x 210 mm)
ISBN: N/A
Price: £8
P&P to UK: £3

Related posts:
‘How to Archive Yourself’on Radio 4
Rough Notes Towards The Psychoanalysis of Trash

Nova Express – William Burroughs

2011-07-30T10:49:00.002+01:00

A Panther Book

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited 1966. Panther edition published 1968. Reprinted 1969. Copyright William Burroughs 1964

‘The section called “This Horrible Case” was written in collaboration with Mr. Ian Sommerville, a mathematician – Mr. Sommerville also contributed to the technical notes in the section called “Chinese Laundry” – An extention of Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method has been used in this book which is consequently a composite of many authors living and dead.’

Cover illustration by Justin Todd.

See also:
Dead Fingers Talk
‘Invading Present Time’: A Lecture at ERG in Brussels
‘Invading Present Time’ available now on Vimeo

The Ticket That Exploded – William Burroughs

2011-07-25T16:21:00.004+01:00

THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED
A CORGI BOOK 0 552 08617 7

Originally published in Great Britain
by Calder and Boyars Ltd

PRINTING HISTORY

Calder and Boyars edition published 1968
Corgi edition published 1971

Acknowledgment

The sections entitled in a strange bed and the black fruit were written in collaboration with Mr Michael Portman of London. Mr Ian Sommerville of London pointed out the use and significance of spliced tape and all other tape recorder experiments suggested in this book. The film experiments suggested I owe to Mr Anthony Balch of Balch Films London. The closing message is by Brion Gysin.

Cover design and typography by person or persons unknown.

The Soft Machine – William Burroughs

2011-07-21T11:44:00.000+01:00

THE SOFT MACHINE
A CORGI BOOK 522 08465 4
Originally published in Great Britain
by Calder & Boyars Ltd.

PRINTING HISTORY
Calder & Boyars edition published 1968
Corgi edition published 1970

‘The first version of The Soft Machine was published in Paris in 1961 and this final definitive edition has been considerably revised by the author.’

Cover design and typography by person or persons unknown.

Catching up with Dario Argento’s ‘Profondo Rosso’ in Turin

2011-07-15T15:37:00.004+01:00

I have been so busily engaged in writing up my recent experiences with My Cat is An Alien in Turin for a forthcoming issue of The Wire that I have not had many opportunities to post some of the more amazing pictures documenting my stay with them. One of the places that Maurizio, Roberto and Ramona were particularly keen to show me was the Villa Scott, tucked away in the Torino Hills, on the other side of the Po from the main city centre. Fans of Dario Argento’s 1975 masterpiece Profondo Rosso will have no trouble recognizing in these gentle art-nouveau lines the setting for one of the defining incidents from this giallo tour de force. Actual locations for movie scenes have their own special architectural presence; they are haunted in a way that only those who have grown up with cinema can possibly understand and must always exist as a link between two worlds. In this case, the gates to the villa were firmly locked, and the entire place seemed to belong only to the late-afternoon shadows. However, my attempts to reach through the railings to photograph the main entrance provoked a growl from somewhere deep in the undergrowth, suggesting that, at the very least, a guard dog was lying in wait for any sign of trespass – and that’s at the very least. Needless to say I pulled my arms back in quite quickly

Pictured above: three views of Villa Scott by KH and three by Roberto Opalio – the last one in the series shows KH and Ramona Ponzini braving the guard dog outside the main gate in the name of cinema, architecture and extreme bloodshed.

Catching Up With Nietzsche In Turin

2011-07-01T10:36:00.003+01:00

‘I arrived on the afternoon of the twenty-first in Turin, my proved place, my Residenz from now on. I took again the same accommodation I had occupied in the spring, via Carlo Alberto 6,III, opposite the mighty palazzo Carignano, in which Vittorio Emanuele was born, with a view of the piazza Carlo Alberto and beyond that the hills.’

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecco Homo

On the morning of January 3, 1889 Friedrich Nietzsche left his lodgings on the piazza Carlo Alberto. Accounts vary slightly on what precisely happened next, but within a few paces he encountered a cab driver beating his horse on or near the piazza Carignano, overlooked by the imposing Baroque facade of the palazzo Carignano. Nietzsche flung his arms around the horse’s neck to protect it, then collapsed to the ground unconscious. He was immediately carried back to his room on the piazza Carlo Alberto, returning along the little side street linking the two squares, again under the stern walls of the palazzo Carignano. When he finally regained consciousness he was no longer sane. Up until his death on August 25, 1900, he was never to be in his right mind again.

I was very moved to be conducted by Roberto and Maurizio Opalio and Ramona Pozzini to visit the spot where the tragic events of January 3 1889 took place. The distances involved seem pitifully small compared with the enormity of the mental breakdown suffered by Nietzsche that day. Even so, Roberto was kind enough to point out to me the window of Nietzsche’s room looking out onto the piazza Carlo Alberto, where I am happy to report that you can still catch a glimpse of the hills beyond.

Pictured above: the palazzo Carignano, bearing the name of Vittorio Emanuele II; the cobbled piazza Carignano and the side street leading to the piazza Carlo Alberto at the top left of the photograph; the side walls of the palazzo Carignano, Nietzsche’s last accommodation in Turin – his room is the one with the open window and the orange curtain, located on the second floor, second in from the left; looking back towards the side street leading to the piazza Carignano. As an unintended side-effect, the lurching zigzag motif suggested in the sequence of pictures above gives a sense of the collapse and distress associated with this part of Turin.

In The Studio With My Cat Is An Alien

2011-06-26T10:04:00.000+01:00

I have just returned from a short stay in Turin as a guest of Roberto and Maurizio Opalio who explore sound and space together as My Cat Is An Alien – we first encountered each other when we performed together on the same bill at Spectra 09, a festival in Valencia dedicated to conspiracy culture. We very much enjoyed each other’s company, so I was very pleased to accept their invitation to visit them in their Alien Studio: a small basement gallery where they create their limited-edition artworks and ‘art edition’ music releases. We managed to cram so much into the two or three days I spent in their company – together with their close collaborator and creative associate Ramona Ponzini – that it will require a few posts to cover everything that happened. I am, however, currently in the process of writing up my experiences for publication in a future issue of The Wire and am also happy to offer here some preview snaps taken inside the Alien Studio with the promise that there will be more fascinating stuff to come.

Pictured above: Roberto Opalio with his Polaroid camera; Roberto and Maurizio Opalio with the wire alien figure featured in Roberto’s film Light_Earth_Blue_Silver; Maurizio Opalio standing in front of some of his artwork; Ramona Ponzini posing with the toy alien figure featured in Roberto’s film Alien Blood

‘Atom Town’ Reading At Arts Catalyst

2011-06-20T08:55:00.007+01:00

On the evening of Thursday June 23, I will be presenting a short reading at the new Arts Catalyst studio on the Clerkenwell Road as part of a public preview screening of Gair Dunlop’s remarkable short film Atom Town, about life in the shadow of the Dounreay reactors. There will also be a performance of suitably retro-futurist electronic tonalities specially created for the occasion by Erstlaub. As arranged with Gair, my reading will cover the irradiated rise of the American suburbs in the years immediately after World War II and is based around writings leading up to, and including, Welcome to Mars. A PDF of the Atom Town catalogue, containing my essay ‘Temporary Storage: Notes on the Dounreay Fast Reactor, Citadel of the Future’, is available to download by clicking here.

The screening takes place at 7pm on Thursday 23rd June at Arts Catalyst, 50-54 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5PS. I hope to see some of you there.

Pictured above: Images from Gair Dunlop’s photostream on Flickr, including a couple of production stills from Atom Town. To view some short clips from the film itself, please click here.

Onstage At The British Library With The Radio Science Orchestra

2011-06-18T11:59:00.002+01:00

‘The future started a long time ago, and we’ve been living there ever since. The equipment you see on display here, like the music it plays, has come to you from another world – one that is a dim and distant reflection of your own, shifted down towards the furthest end of the spectrum. This is Mars calling, bringing you yesterday’s sounds today…’

It is always a pleasure to take the stage with The Radio Science Orchestra and a rare thrill indeed to bring the whole show to the British Library: my thanks to everyone who took part in a wonderful event, either as performers or members of the audience – and a special thank you to Daily Planet roving shutterbug Kitty Keen for being on hand with her trusty box brownie to capture a few fleeting moments and keep them safe for the future.

Pictured above: KH at the lectern; Joy Smith communing with her orb; Bruce Woolley going seriously analogue with Kit Woolley on bass guitar, KH in a blue mood; Charlie Draper at the Theremin, Joy Smith on the harp and Andy Visser on everything else; KH on the far side.

Martians and Communists at the British Library

2011-06-12T09:37:00.004+01:00

On Friday June 17 I am making a rare live appearance with my old friends the Radio Science Orchestra at an evening event organized as part of the British Library’s ‘Out of This World’ exhibition. Coordinated and led by the legendary Bruce Woolley, the RSO specializes in combining the sounds of vintage electronic instruments with more conventional items such as harp and woodwind. In the past we have presented shows together at the ICA to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik with Thomas Dolby and a collaboration at Bath’s ICIA based around themes from Welcome to Mars and the RSO’s History of the Future album release.

On Friday night we bring you ‘Return to Mars’: an exploration of cosmic easy listening, master scientists from outer space, hybrid humans, Soviet cosmonauts and alien messengers. Sharing the bill with us are Global Communications, making their first live appearance since…well ever, really, plus DJ sets from Rob Da Bank and Jon Hopkins, and the whole thing will take place in the British Library’s palatial departure lounge of an entrance hall. For more information, click here.

Meanwhile here is some extra text from the British Library press release:

The British Library celebrates Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it with a unique music event featuring rare live performances by Global Communication and The Radio Science Orchestra plus exceptional DJs Rob da Bank and Jon Hopkins.

The retro-space sound of the Radio Science Orchestra featuring theremin and other futuristic instruments is the brainchild of Bruce Woolley, the phenomenally talented writer and producer of everything from Video Killed The Radio Star (The Buggles) to Slave To The Rhythm (Grace Jones) and A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld (The Orb). Tonight’s special show is entitled Return To Mars and features the visionary SF musings of writer Ken Hollings.

See you there…otherwise I’ll see you in the next world...don’t be late.

‘Tender Vessels’ by Cathy Ward and Eric Wright

2011-06-07T10:09:00.004+01:00

It seems to be increasingly the case that if you wish to find a reasonable account of current events, visit an art gallery; artists tend to be more reliable investigators of the state of human affairs than the average journalist these days. Should you prefer poetry to headlines, however, then you should look no further than the work of Cathy Ward and Eric Wright. Published by Strange Attractor Press in association with Galerie Toxic of Luxembourg, Tender Vessels offers sumptuous documentation of one of their more recent shows. As always, their work demonstrates the extravagance of artists who don’t waste the smallest thing if they can possibly help it – everything is used and nothing is wasted. The result in visual terms is a kind of post-industrial folk art, offering a detailed glimpse of lives spent in the shadow of dark and terrible forces.

In this particular case, Ward and Wright examine the baleful influence of industry and empire as historical processes – a theme ably discussed in the accompanying essays by Mark Pilkington and Doug Harvey respectively. Punctuated by quotations from Milton, Melville and Defoe, and illustrated with photographs of rituals and riots, Tender Vessels is a mixed-media show in which the richest materials appear to have been thrown together either by shipwrecks or sacred rites. Economic progress is consequently revealed to be just another tribal fetish fashioned to protect us against the coming storm. Those who recall the elegant tourist-centre trash of Ward and Wright’s Transromantik project may be tempted to believe that, swimming against the tide of history, Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid has finally had her revenge.

Tender Vessels
Cathy Ward and Eric Wright
£19.99, full colour, PB, 120pp
ISBN 9781907222047

Pictured from top to bottom: The Luddite Revolt/Home Rites; The Initiation Rite to the Order of Gain; Before the Gold Rush; Tender Vessel

Catching Up With Santa Pod Raceway

2011-06-01T11:20:00.004+01:00

Based around the runway of a former WWII airbase, the Santa Pod Raceway is a recurring architectural marvel made up of tents, trucks, marquees and trailers. Formerly part of Poddington Airbase, the drag strip becomes the focal point two or three times a year for FIA Top Fuel events featuring monstrous cars and even more monstrous engines. Burning up vicious chemicals like nitro-methane, a form of underwater explosive, and capable of hitting speeds over 300 mph, these mad desire machines are designed and built to do one thing extremely well: go as fast as possible in a straight line over a quarter mile in a matter of seconds. Effectively a road that leads nowhere, the drag strip becomes the focal point for a temporary city that comes alive with strange mechanical life forms during the course of a meeting. Unfortunately the recent Bank Holiday event was rained off – which meant that a lot of them never left the workshop. It’s been a couple of years since I last visited this earth-bound space station; and while the protracted rain made any form of racing impossible, it did give me a chance to photograph some of the pit area, where crews continued to work on and exhibit a range of top fuel funny cars, classic slingshot dragsters and wicked fuel-altereds in a makeshift historical gallery of human engineering.

Pictured above: tents, trucks and raingear; a top fuel engine being worked on in the pits; a fuel-altered dragster on display; a classic slingshot under canvas - with thanks to Izabel and Roger K Burton of the Horse Hospital for organizing the visit.

‘Which Way to Techno-Utopia?’ podcast available from Little Atoms

2011-05-27T13:27:00.004+01:00

Neil Denny of Little Atoms has just informed me that an edited recording of ‘Which Way to Techno-Utopia?’, a recent panel discussion at the Free Word Centre in which I participated, is available as a podcast. In an extremely lively and wide-ranging exchange, moderated with exuberant delicacy by probing barefoot technologist Becky Hogge, I joined fellow writers Angela Saini, Gia Milinovitch in examining the past, present and future of ‘techno-utopia’ both as concept and potential reality.

Topics covered included Astro Boy and European Romanticism, corrupt government administration and the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Norbert Weiner and the technological future of India, LSD and gated communities. Becky did a fabulous job keeping the things moving in a light but purposeful manner; and I could - and probably should - have listened to Angela and Gia for hours. My favourite moment of the entire evening came when a member of the audience asked us a question about the oppositional relationship between nature and technology in Western thought and then left the room while we answered it. It turned out he was just answering his phone. No wonder Adam and Eve got themselves kicked out of the country club.

You can find ‘Which Way to Techno-Utopia’ either by visiting this link, or you can download the whole thing by simply clicking here. In any case, you are strongly urged to visit the Little Atoms site if you have not done so already, as they have some amazing material featured both in their podcasts and their weekly show on Resonance 104.4 FM.

Pictured above from right to left: KH, Angela Saini, Becky Hogge and Gia Milinovitch, almost live and direct at the Free Word Centre – photograph by Neil Denny (thanks, Neil).

‘Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe’ published in Super Kritische Berichte

2011-05-24T11:30:00.005+01:00

Details concerning the latest edition of Kritische Berichte from Jonas Verlag have just been posted online. This special issue, given the one-off title ‘Super Kritische Berichte’ but is also numbered more prosaically 1.2011, has been edited by Joseph Imorde and Jörg Scheller, who organized the conference on Superheroes, Supermen and Ubermensch at which I gave a talk in Siegen last May. The journal’s contents - predominantly presented in German but with occasional Anglophone outbreaks - reflect developments from and reflections on that memorable exchange – two papers I particularly enjoyed were Henry Keazor’s ‘“Up and Atom!”’ Superheroes in the Simpsons’ (in English) and Roland Meyer’s ‘Im leeren Zentrum der Netze’ (very much in German) on the cycle of Mabuse films.

My own essay ‘Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe’ expands upon my lecture ‘The Purple Death’, first given at ‘Kill Your Timid Notion’ in 2007, connecting Flash and Ming with Ludwig II, Walter Benjamin, John Carter of Mars and Andy Warhol. Anyone whose German is up to it and has a weakness for figuring out what the hell The Joker, Anthrax and the X-Men are actually about should immediatelty use their Bat Computer and Decoder Ring to order up a copy online – I mean how many back issues of Watchmen can you get for 12 Euros these days?

Note: a recording of my original lecture ‘The Purple Death’ as delivered at ‘Kill Your Timid Notion’ in 2007 can be accessed by clicking here.

Simon Fisher Turner and ‘The Great White Silence’

2011-05-20T09:33:00.005+01:00

‘Great God! This is an awful place,’ Robert Falcon Scott confided to his diary on January 17 1912, having just reached the South Pole only to discover that a Norwegian expedition, led by Roald Admundsen, had already been there ahead of him. Within weeks of penning that entry Captain Scott and his entire party would be dead. The official record of their journey, which had begun in October 1910 with the Terra Nova setting sail from New Zealand for the Antarctic, was entrusted to photographer and filmmaker Herbert Ponting. First released in 1913, Ponting’s film document of the tragic endeavour, The Great White Silence has been fully restored by the British Film Institute National Archive and features a remarkable new musical score by Simon Fisher Turner. Having created soundtracks for many of Derek Jarman’s later movies, including The Last of England, The Garden and Blue, Turner is the perfect choice to produce the accompaniment to a film that, even in its title, seems to push at the very edge of audiovisual experience.

I had the pleasure of corresponding with Simon Fisher Turner about his new soundtrack for the film over Easter – you can read a more condensed version of our exchanges in the June issue of The Wire. Simon was, as always, very generous with his time, giving me more detailed information than I could possibly fit into the space allotted in the magazine. I am therefore reproducing below – with his permission of course – a complete transcript of my questions and Simon’s answers.

KH: It must be daunting to create an OST for a film with the word ‘silence’ featured so prominently in the title – were there any specific challenges that you identified and how did you approach them?

SFT: I like the silence, but it’s very difficult to use it when you’ve been commissioned to make music, not silence. To start with the film is a composite of probably three parts, so to start with just working out what was what was a difficult thing. It’s a complicated, layered film: fact, fiction, faked fact, and a nature film too. It took weeks to understand this. I worked initially from a shot list that I found at the BFI. This was crucial, as it explained exactly what I had. It was the script basically, and I used it constantly.

How do you score twenty-two minutes of penguin music, however?

I decided not to go down the sound effect route. I wanted to create something which was related as much as possible to fact and reality. I was lucky in that I recorded the bell from the Terra Nova. I was lucky with Chris Watson giving me the recording from Scott’s hut. I was lucky with a list which Briony at the BFI uncovered, which had the names of at least ten recordings they took with them on the journey. We know they took two gramophones and a piano player with them. So I went online searching the globe for recordings of piano players playing pre-1911 songs. Great fun this research by the way. It was a real privilege to have the time to search all this out. Extraordinary we never found a recording of the man himself. I would have liked that.

KH: It must feel strange to create new music for footage that is now a hundred years old. How did you approach this?

SFT: The age of the footage worried me not. The silence was the worry.

KH: The accompanying BFI notes mention that you drew inspiration from Indian and Japanese silent movie conventions – what are these and how did you use them?

SFT: It’s not so much the inspiration from any particular film; but with some research a few years ago I found out that in early Japanese silent films, the musicians who accompanied them didn’t really take too much notice of the films they were accompanying. They apparently just played, so this in my mind also freed me up to just play and not worry so much about the way the film had to be supported musically.

KH: What kind of sound sources did you use for the creation of your score?

SFT: This film has used up all my best found sounds from over the last three years. Odd things seemed to make sense. For our first iceberg sighting I used a recording of a metal bench I recorded in Berlin. The timbre and quality of sound seemed to make sense. You can hear the rust jump inside the bench as I hit it with my fist. Rust works for me in this context as all the hut and belongings in the hut now remain but are rusty and decaying. This was also put into FORESTER, a beautiful piece of something that Leafcutter John made and invented.

To imitate the sound of the blizzard at the end of the film I used a recording of a huge silk stage-curtain I recorded in Kyoto after a concert by Jyoji Sawada. It was like a safety curtain, and I knew immediately I should record this. I had a Sony Pro cassette machine then and just dragged the mike over the surface of the curtain. Then I put it into Ableton and recorded it straight to picture, re-EQing as I went along.

For the sea journey to the Pole I went online initially and just got seascape sounds, but we dropped these after I went to Porto in December last year and I found myself recording a large sea at the end of a pier jutting out into the Atlantic ocean. The penny dropped, and as soon as I was in the studio again the following week we replaced the temporary sea for my new one. It was a stroke of luck again. My favourite found sounds used in the film are: BENCH, SILK THEATRE CURTAIN, ELECTRIC TOY HAMPSTER ( sound of the penguins) and MUSICAL SAW.

The Great White Silence from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

KH: The archive recordings are particularly effective – especially the Madame Butterfly at the start of the voyage – what drew you to these specific recordings?

SFT: We knew Scott took a recording of this to the pole. Not this exact one but a similar recording. For the historical things I went online and searched for recording before 1911. We know he took banjo music too, hence the one we used in the film too. It’s all out of copyright. There were only ten entries on the list Briony found of records they took to the Pole. Once I knew Butterfly was on, it made a lot of sense since Scott was also leaving behind his wife and baby son.

KH: It was very nice to hear Chris Watson’s voice on the soundtrack – what made you include this?

SFT: He gave me the recording after we met in Newcastle. He casually asked me what I was doing, and I had just been asked the day before to score the film. So I told him, and he kindly said: ‘Well I’ve got exactly what you need.’ This was the very first piece of the jigsaw, and what a kind gesture too from Chris. He got the ball rolling in the most honest and wonderful way. What a way to begin the project. I was so excited I called Jane Giles who commissioned me and I told her. It was a wonderful beginning to an extraordinary journey.

I initially wanted to just have ‘the silence’ he recorded, but without Chris’s explanation as to what we were listening to, it would have made no sense whatsoever. I like the fact that he tells us where he is and what he’s recording. It’s a key moment for me.

The other silent part of the film we have is when the team reach the pole and realize they’ve been beaten. There’s a sad picture of them looking into camera, demoralized and beaten. For this silence I recorded the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month from the Cenotaph! This made sense to me too and it is like our own private honour for these explorers.

KH: The footage of Scott and his team ‘snuggling down’ in their sleeping bags is especially moving – was it particularly challenging to create music for that moment?

SFT: A difficult scene: long. It uses drifts I’ve processed from one of my favourite instruments which is ‘Leviathan’ from the reactor family. Also piano and four separate bass parts. The piano I made up in the studio. Very improvised to picture initially, then it’s eyes closed for emotion. For the second half of the film once they left camp for the final push into ‘the great white silence’ I started to record very long takes and re-EQ all the time to keep textures moving constantly.

KH: Are there any plans for a separate CD release of the soundtrack?

SFT: There’s a CD release on Soleilmoon in June. A double disc limited-edition with beautiful artwork made with care by Charles Powne.

KH: Simon Fisher Turner, thank you.

‘Which Way to Techno-Utopia?’

2011-05-18T16:24:00.005+01:00

On Monday May 23 I am taking part in a panel discussion at the Free Word Centre in London. Presented under the auspices of Little Atoms,‘Which Way to Techno-Utopia?’ promises to be a really quite an occasion. It’s chaired by genial Hollingsville contributor Becky Hogge so should be nothing if not lively. Tickets cost £5 (£3 concessions) and you’d be well advised to book in advance via the Free Word intelligent tickets service. Hope to see you there. In the meantime, the following Little Atoms release should give you all the information you need:

Over the last century technology has evolved exponentially and has changed our lives in ways that are too numerous to count. But what effect does technology have on wider society? How has it changed the ways we interact and communicate? Does technology have the capacity to change fundamentally who we are as human beings? Has technology freed us, or have we become its slaves? And what of the future? Will technology save or harm the planet?

Joining us to discuss these questions and more are

Gia Milinovitch

Gia Milinovich is a presenter, writer and blogger, specializing mainly in new media and film. She has an acute knowledge of computers, technology, the Internet and science. She has worked in a technical capacity on major blockbusters including The X-Files: I Want to Believe, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and 28 Weeks Later, and created the ‘behind the scenes’ website for the critically-acclaimed sci-fi film Sunshine. She advised on and appeared in the 2009 BBC programme Electric Dreams.

Angela Saini

Angela Saini is an independent science journalist based in London, she has written for New Scientist, Wired, The Economist and leading scientific journals in the UK and the US. Her first television science documentary aired in November 2008, and she can be regularly heard reporting on technology issues for the BBC World Service radio show ‘Digital Planet’. She was named European Young Science Writer of the Year in 2009. bilingual English and Hindi speaker, she previously worked in India for The Hindu newspaper group. Angela is the author of Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World.

Ken Hollings

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work draws freely upon trash culture, weird science, political intrigue and strange connections to reconfigure reality and demolish common assumptions. His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound and Strange Attractor. He has written and presented critically acclaimed programmes for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, Resonance FM, NPS in Holland and ABC Australia. He is the author of Welcome to Mars: Science and the American Century 1947-1959 and Destroy All Monsters. Ken’s most recent project for Radio 3 was Requiem for The Network, a series of essays on the history, power and revolutionary change of information networks.

Chair: Becky Hogge

Little Atoms

Little Atoms is a radio show about ideas and culture with an emphasis on ideas of the Enlightenment. We actively promote science, freedom of expression, scepticism and secular humanism. Little Atoms is broadcast every Friday evening at 7pm on Resonance 104.4fm, and is subsequently available as a podcast via iTunes. Find out more at www.littleatoms.com and follow us on Twitter at @littleatoms.

Free Word Centre
60 Farringdon Road
London
EC1R 3GA

020 7324 2570
info@freewordonline.com

Pictured above: ‘Et In Utopia Sum’, courtesy of roving shutterbug Kitty Keen

‘Invading Present Time’ available now on Vimeo

2011-05-16T12:14:00.002+01:00

Séminaire 2011 : Ken Hollings from erg on Vimeo.

As if to prove my point that visitors to this blog are regularly among the last to know about the online documentation of my talks, events and readings, footage of my ERG lecture ‘Invading Present Time’ has been available from Vimeo for the past three months – only nobody involved with the posting thought to inform me about it.I mention this not as a complaint but to illustrate a point: one of the biggest challenges facing us today is how to make best use of the vast amounts of data storage made available to us, either on the drives in our recording devices or online platforms. It is now incredibly rare for any event in which I participate not to be recorded in some form or other – if any of this material becomes available at all it is often mislabelled, tagged incorrectly, or those doing the documentation neglect to inform me of its presence online. All information is now a location – coordinates are required.

That said, this is a pretty good film. Presented here under the French title ‘Politiques de la Simulation’, ‘Invading Present Time’ looks at Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, early sound recordings, zombies and videogame design; some of the broader lines of its argument will be found in the appropriate chapter of The Bright Labyrinth – this at least offers you a live rough draft and a feel for the event itself. The filming is also tight; they used a two-camera set up throughout, and the editing is fairly smooth and fluid. I also love the booming stadium sound system required to fill the large industrial space where the Corps/Machine conference took place – and who can resist a handheld mike? My thanks to everyone involved in the event and in the presentation of this video. Just remember to tell me where I am in future.

See also:
Dead Fingers Talking
‘Invading Present Time’ – A Lecture at ERG in Brussels
Invading Present Time – The Politics of Simulation

Spacemen of the Free World

2011-05-11T17:50:00.002+01:00

Roving shutterbug Kitty Keen was recovered sufficiently from her recent encounter with a UFO in the Cotswolds to capture these images of my recent lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. ‘Living In Space’ was part of Strange Attractor Salon, a series of talks organized to accompany Nathaniel Mellors’ Ourhouse exhibition which managed successfully to weather the recent royal wedding celebrations, despite the ICA’s close proximity to Buck House. Tickets for the talk were completely sold out; and it was an absolute pleasure to address such an enthusiastic and responsive audience. Even better was the last-minute addition of Leila Sayal to the line-up, magically transforming The Asterism into electro-bohemian pop duo Indigo Octagon, making its first ever public appearance.

Those familiar with the opening and closing themes which Indigo Octagon created for Hollingsville last year will recall how beautifully Leila’s Theremin playing blended in with Mark Pilkington’s freeform analogue shimmer. The background ambience they created for my lecture was pretty much worth the price of admission alone. I could have read out the label from a can of dolphin-friendly tuna to what they were playing, and it would still have sounded classy. A recording was made of the event, and no doubt something will surface in due course. Readers of my blog will, of course, be among the last to know. In the meantime, Life magazine has posted some revealing pictures of Alan Shephard’s space hop, which was partially the inspiration for this talk.

Pictured above: Mark grapples with Misty; Leila at the Theremin; the full effect; KH on the outer fringes of space – courtesy of the talented Miss Keen

Catching Up With The Baunton UFO

2011-05-06T09:00:00.001+01:00

The distinguishing feature of Unidentified Flying Objects is that they are – for better or worse – unidentified. An identified object tends to be one that can be easily categorized as something else: in other words in becoming identified it is transformed into a specific object, entity of phenomenon. A chair is, therefore, not an identified object – it’s a chair. The picture reproduced above was taken by roving shutterbug Kitty Keen, a regular photographic contributor to this blog, around 3.30 in the afternoon of April 20, 2011. She was walking in a field somewhere between Baunton and Cirencester in the Cotswolds and had actually stopped to capture a distant view of Cirencester Parish Church, whose square tower is a local landmark, which can be seen in the middle of the horizon on this picture. Quite what the spinning, vibrating object in the sky to its left might be is anybody’s guess. Miss Keen didn’t even notice it until we examined the picture together later that day. According to Mark ‘Mirage Men’ Pilkington, the object corresponds to a vintage type included in the 1952 NORAD UFO spotting chart: either a ‘winged cigar shape’ or ‘winged cylinder-shaped’, which narrows it down a bit. Those already familiar with Mark’s excellent book will appreciate that, as always, there is more to this than meets the eye. In the meantime Miss Keen would like to point out that she does not work for any government agency.

Note: this entry is being labelled as part of my occasional series of posts on architecture as objects and in the sky and church towers always tend to do strange things to the landscape.

‘Living In Space’ Talk at the ICA

2011-04-26T09:42:00.003+01:00

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of NASA’s Freedom 7 mission, which saw Alan Shepard become the ‘First Man in the Free World’ to take a ride on the end of a rocket, I will be presenting the lecture ‘Living in Space’ at the ICA in London on May 5. Taking place fifty years to the day when Shepard made his short – if heroic – ascent, my talk will be concerned with biological time, architecture and technology. Consider it a counterpart to ‘Radiant Static’, my recent talk on Yuri Gagarin at Club Integral. This time my words will also be accompanied by the sublime radiophonic tones of The Asterism on dials, wires and bleeps. It should be quite an event.

No rocket ever survives its entry into space. It becomes consumed instead, dismantling itself in carefully timed stages, disintegrating and dispersing in an excess of energy, waste and debris: a brief moment of industrialized ecstasy. Then it falls away into uselessness.The desire to build a rocket positions you in both time and space. A trawl through NASA planning documents dating from the Moon landing onwards reveals the forced pace of progress: a manned landing Mars by 1982, a functioning Lunar base by 1995. Meanwhile gravity holds you in place.

Space exploration reads too much like a history lesson these days: we’re already haunted by it, forgetting specific details, glossing over events. ‘Isn’t it better to talk about the relative merits of washing machines than the relative strengths of rockets?’ Richard Nixon asked Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during their televised ‘kitchen debate’ back in 1959, without a single housewife in sight. Call it progress if you will.

A featured part of the Strange Attractor Salon currently in residence at the ICA, the talk will start at 7.00 pm and will be followed by a screening of Larry Cohen’s The Stuff. Tickets for the talk and the film can be bought separately at £5.00 apiece, or you can pay £8.00 and see both my talk and Cohen’s barf-tastic masterpiece in one package – although I do not recommend trying to take in both at the same time.

‘Living in Space’
7.00 pm, May 5, The ICA, The Mall, London
Admission £5.00

Pictured above: Alan Shepard – doing it for the Free World.

‘Radiant Static’: a talk on Yuri Gagarin for Easter Sunday

2011-04-19T10:15:00.001+01:00

Anyone remaining in London over the spring festivities may like to know that I am giving a short talk about Yuri Gagarin on the eve of Easter Sunday as part of ‘I Don’t See Any God Up Here’, an event organized by Club Integral at the Grosvenor in SW9. Other participants include Space Heads, Gagarin and Oscillatorial Binnage vs. Sound of the Sun. All the relevant details are included on the flyer reproduced above or can be accessed by clicking here.

It seems entirely appropriate to stage a memorial to the great achievement of Yuri Gagarin as part of the mystery of Easter rather than another instalment in the series of hearty celebrations officially held on Cosmonaut’s Day. The truth is that we don’t want our cosmonauts and astronauts back in our lives – they are too painful a reminder of technological as well as spiritual failure, just one more indication that we are trapped down here on this cop-ridden planet, beset by the sins of materiality and so terribly afraid that there will be no resurrection. Gagarin’s claim not to have seen God while orbiting the Earth is not, therefore, the cheery expression of faith in progressive humanism but an echo of the dark despair of a redeemer, abandoned in Hell, giving up all hope of a new dawn. Have a Happy Easter.

Strange Attractor Journal Four

2011-04-14T10:46:00.002+01:00

The fourth incarnation of Strange Attractor Journal has already started walking among you; and that, as always, is something that requires ceremony and celebration. Edited by Mark Pilkington with his usual deftness, the latest volume contains my essay ‘From Atlantis to Mars: The Dream of Venus’, offering another foretaste of The Bright Labyrinth, plus amazing contributions from such luminaries as Erik Davis, Alan Moore, Mike Jay, Andy Sharp and Richard Barnett – together with cover art by Julian House and Joel Biroco. As with the previous three editions, Strange Attractor Journal Four has the weight, heft and depth of a literary anthology: the only thing coming close to it in the past millennium being BLAST, the Vorticist journal put out by Wyndham Lewis and his pals –and that only ran for two issues. Meanwhile Strange Attractor has already announced plans for Journal Five and is now poised to take over London’s trendy Institute of Contemporary Arts tomorrow evening with a music night to celebrate the launch of Journal Four. Come along if you can – here’s the dope:

Please join us for a night of transcendence, otherness and bliss at the ICA on Friday 15 April for our Strange Attractor music night, Weirding Modules, from 7pm.
This is effectively the launch party for SAJ4, though this time it’s £5 to get in and the drinks aren’t free. But we’ll have SAJ4 available at £10 so that’s not so bad. And you do get some incredible live music:

Alex Tucker and band need no introduction, though tonight Strange Attractor’s own Frances Morgan joins them on violin

The full Amal Gamal Ensemble line up, this heavy kosmische supergroup being the nearest you’ll get to seeing Tangerine Dream circa 1969 anywhere without a functioning time machine.

And Raagnagrok, who were in fine fettle last weekend in Canterbury and will be joined once again by Andy Letcher of Telling the Bees on breton pipes and, for the first time anywhere, the brilliant Paul May on drums and exhibiting artist Nathaniel Mellors on bass.

Frances Morgan doubles up on the decks, joined by the mighty Matt ‘Woebot’ Ingram, for obscure gems from the akashic jukebox.

Looking forward to seeing you there! Booking details for the event can be found in cyberspace by putting your cursor here and briskly clicking a couple of times.

A PDF of the contents pages for Strange Attractor Journal Four can be found by doing the same thing here; and full ordering information for the volume can be found by opening a portal here.

Pictured above: Strange Attractor Four front cover, ‘Peacock Angels’ by Julian House - tenebrae fiunt.

‘How to Archive Yourself’ on Radio 4

2011-04-11T11:10:00.006+01:00

You will see that I have been keeping strange company of late: first giving a brief talk on the connections between Ludwig II, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson at ‘Pretty – Ugly’ as part of my continuing research into the psychoanalysis of trash and then appearing in the latest edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘File on Four’ series. Presented by photographer, filmmaker and broadcaster Toby Amies, ‘How to Archive Yourself’ is a leisurely stroll through people’s attempts to document experience and what happens to such memories after they migrate online – other contributors to this fascinating show include Microsoft’s Gordon Bell, ‘the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers’, and (no, really – say it isn’t so) Robert Fripp of King Crimson.

The relationship between trash and storage – and how this becomes an expression of that between utility and aesthetics – has been a recurring theme on this blog and a particular episode of ‘Hollingsville’. My conversation with Toby took place roughly about ten minutes after I had finished talking about Paul Baran in another studio at Broadcasting House; and was recorded in a side office with BBC staff strolling past on the other side of the glass wall. It turned out to be a lot of fun – when I admitted that I would usually try to bring along a digital camera along to sessions like this but was getting tired of photographing the inside of BBC studios, Toby gave me a startled look of straight-faced disappointment. ‘It’s because we’re ugly, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Go on – admit it.’ Honestly, Toby, I wasn’t going to say anything, but now that you’ve dragged it out of me…

The conversation – I really would hate to call anything that relaxed an ‘interview’ – ended up being a freewheeling and extremely stimulating affair, right down to me complaining about the amount of digital documentation that regularly takes place at conferences, panels and festivals but then never turns up online – except maybe months afterwards, wrongly tagged or accompanied by incorrect or misleading information. I wasn’t sure what Toby and producer Sara Jane Hall were going to make of the whole thing – but the resulting show turns out to have considerable informality and charm. ‘How to Archive Yourself’ will be available on i-Player for the rest of this week and can be accessed by clicking here.

Pictured above: KH discourses on the Psychoanalysis of Trash at ‘Pretty – Ugly’, photos courtesy of roving shutterbug Kitty Keen.

Spirit Horns: Part Two

2011-04-09T14:29:00.006+01:00

The story so far: EVP researcher and recording artist Michael Esposito and I are on a visit to the studio of composer Aleksander Kolkowski , which is packed with the most remarkable collection of antique sound production equipment. Now that I have recorded a text onto one of Aleksander’s vintage Edison phonographs, the room is now ready for Michael to conduct an EVP session.

Michael had brought a small MP3 recorder with him, and there followed a deep discussion between him and Aleksander over what software platforms to use in order to process the EVP files he was about to make. As I still regard ProTools with a respect verging on religious awe, having witnessed it clean up and shape too many recorded interviews in the past to think of it in any other way, I refrained from taking part in this part of the proceedings. After a break for tea and a chance for Michael to smoke a quick cigarette out on the balcony above the studio, we went back inside to find the mood in the room had changed appreciably. Michael had used the MP3 recorder only a couple of days before at the home of Mike Harding, cofounder of the ParaPsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative (PARC), as part of an EVP session, and the device had started running wild: the signal kept switching back and forth across the left and right channels during the recording. Michael played it back to us, and the air seemed to vibrate and pulse around the little handheld machine. This was going to be interesting, I thought. For the first part of the session Michael asked Aleksander to switch on two of his Edison phonograms, one set to record and the other to play back, and leave the cylinders spinning for the duration, not playing or recording anything but just set in motion. The result was an eerie seething sound, made all the more churning and oppressive by the fact that the three of us conducted the entire session standing in silence. Edison never intended these machines to record silence – the last words and final breath of the dying perhaps, but never silence. The phonographs’ smooth grinding continued as Michael would ask an occasional question of the room. ‘Who are you?’ Pause. ‘Is there anything you want?’ Pause. ‘Is there anything you recognize?’ He shifted the recorder around from machine to machine – ‘Use the spirit horns if you have something to say,’ he politely suggested, indicating some of the equipment assembled about us.

I remain completely open-minded on the subject of EVP; although an aunt, of whom I was very fond, had been a practising clairaudient for much of her life. Even so, looking around Aleksander’s studio, I really wanted these machines to offer up their voices. We played the five-minute recording back, Michael listening intently, picking out phrases, boosting the signal and playing them that. He made a note of the statement ‘I’m Jacob’ and suggested we focus on that for the second part of the session. I could not always make out the phrases and statements Michael stopped at and replayed and was prepared to say so – the experience was enough, however, to see that the best recording artists are the ones who, however instinctively, treat their equipment as if it were a living organism rather than a mere assemblage of parts. ‘Wow. Did you hear that?’ Michael suddenly asked, bringing us back to the present. No – play it again. ‘That time?’ No sorry – again. And then, on the third replay I heard it – a dry phantom voice emerging from the background hiss of the room, stating very slowly and deliberately: ‘I want…the machine…to work.’

After that we really needed to take another short break, just to get out of the room and clear our heads and breathe some air that was a little less charged. ‘If you ran sessions in this place on a regular basis, ‘Michael pointed out as we sat together in the kitchen ‘this whole space would get much hotter. You’d get more and better messages the more often you recorded here.’ It’s clear that this has become a regular discipline for him – a kind of training of the sensibilities that connects him to spaces and machines in a very subtle way, sometimes even taking over his personality. He spoke a little about getting ‘jumped’ when a session can suddenly take you over, altering your behaviour and even your appearance. He said it had happened one or two times over the past eight years or so. The experience did not sound pleasant.

Back in Aleksander’s studio, the second session took place in silence with all the devices switched off. Aleks and I tried taking a few photographs of Michael in action, working with the room, placing the machine inside the phonograph horns suspended from the ceiling, but we soon stopped. The stillness of a room in which three relative strangers are standing together in silence is already a very moving thing. It seems to grow around you. Michael asked some questions of Jacob – to see what kind of response he might get. The apparently one-sided exchange with the room in which answers only emerge afterwards – in ‘machine time’, as it were – was solemn and disturbing all at the same time. ‘Did you die in this room?’ Michael asked at one point, making me feel happy for the first time that it wasn’t my room he was recording in. But then we rarely know about the rooms that strangers have died in – any building in existence can have witnessed the deaths of many people before you ever come to it.

This was a shorter and far more intense session – I was amazed however when I checked my watch to discover that several hours had already passed. By then Michael and Aleksander were already hunched over a Mac, running the two recordings through different software to clean up and clarify the recordings. Voices were slowly emerging from the amplified hiss and background hum of the room. ‘They hide in the cracks,’ Michael commented as Aleksander highlighted and amplified a wave form, stretching it out. ‘They hide right down inside the sound itself.’ That humans and machines interact with each other to produce some form of alien – or other – consciousness remains an intriguing proposition. To me, it opens up the possibility that a new kind of audiovisual poetry might emerge – or at the very least be better understood. I watched and listened at a respectful distance as Aleks and Michael worked together – the results were fascinating, but it was soon time for me to go. I said my goodbyes during one of Michael’s cigarette breaks. By then it was nightfall and growing quite cold. Aleksander and I joined Michael out of the balcony one last time, watching the landing lights of passenger planes cut through the dark clouds on their way to Heathrow.

Michael and Aleksander are currently still at work on the recordings – Aleks having in the meantime run then through his Edison phonographs. The process is still continuing, so look out for further posts on the session in due course.

Pictured above: Michael Esposito and Aleksander Kolkowski prepare the room for the EVP session; Michael playing back the first recording; Michael and Aleksander listening in; Michael with one of the phonograph horns during the second recording (photo by Aleksander). For more pictures of Aleksander’s wonderful studio on the Found 0bjects blog, please click here.

Rough Notes Towards The Psychoanalysis of Trash

2011-04-06T08:44:00.005+01:00

On Thursday April 7 I am giving a short talk at The Gopher Hole on Old Street in London as part of Pretty – Ugly, a fundraising event being organized by postgraduate communication design students from Central St Martins. They describe the aim of their project as follows:

The title Pretty―Ugly is a casual phrase imbued with a range of subtexts: aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, desire and repulsion, interest and disinterest, surface and essence, polish and sincerity. In a sentence: we are interested in exploring a ‘naïve’ aesthetic as it is created by very aware, professional designers.

Through our workshops, exhibition, series of talks and our auction, we hope to raise a critical discussion on the subject of contemporary ‘undesign’.

The talks are scheduled to take place within 6.00 pm and 7.00 pm – there is also an exhibition, and a publication will be available on the night. My presentation will take the form of a brief return to, and reflection upon, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Trash’, one of the lectures I gave as part of Neville Brody’s Anti-Design Festival last year. Some of the notes for the talk are reproduced in the Pretty – Ugly publication.

In the meantime, a video of my Anti-Design Festival lecture on trash has been posted on Vimeo by Ignite Creative TV – overall, the footage looks pretty good, although the opening title identifying me as Jennifer Walshe probably doesn’t speak too highly for the company’s post-production skills.

A Tribute to Paul Baran on BBC Radio 4

2011-04-03T15:26:00.002+01:00

In what turned out to be an appropriate conclusion to Requiem for the Network, my series of talks for Radio 3 last week, I had an opportunity to pay tribute to the design genius of Paul Baran. Talking with Paul about his experiences at the RAND Corporation during the 1960s for my R3 feature All Your Tomorrows Today provided not only one of the highpoints of that particular show but also one of my fondest memories of working in radio to date. I am pleased to say that you can hear extracts from that original conversation intercut with my own commentary on Paul’s remarkable career in a sequence from the April 1 edition of Radio 4’s regular broadcast obituary The Last Word.

The piece sticks pretty closely to the story of Baran’s development of the distributed network, the basic conceptual architecture of the internet, but also gives some sense of the man and his relationship to the Cold War world of strategic thinking. My favourite moment in the original interview was when he revealed that his papers on distributed communication were translated into Russian so that the Soviets could have easy access to them: ‘We wanted them to have that information,’ he explained. ‘Their communication systems were even worse than ours.’ His tremendous work at the Institute for the Future, the think tank which he cofounded in 1968 with Jacques Vallée and Olaf Helmer is yet to be fully assessed – but then it’s still a going concern, as my friend David Pescovitz told me in a recent conversation which we recorded together for broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM sometime later this year. Paul Baran will be greatly missed. The future may well go on without him – but it won’t be same.

The edition of The Last Word featuring Paul Baran is currently available on i-Player and can be accessed by clicking here. It also comes as a podcast and can be found here. This feature should stay up online for about a month - but you can never tell theses days.

See also:
In Memoriam: Paul Baran, 1926-2011
‘Requiem for the Network’ on BBC Radio 3

Pictured above: the Institute for the Future logo – where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

Spirit Horns: Part One

2011-04-02T10:54:00.003+01:00

I recently had the pleasure of spending an intriguing afternoon with EVP researcher and recording artist Michael Esposito at the amazing studio of the composer Aleksander Kolkowski. Regular readers of this blog may recall that Michael was responsible with Carl Michael von Hausswolff for issuing The Ghosts of Effingham: a set of EVP recordings inscribed onto an Edison wax cylinder which also glowed in the dark. An enthused researcher of the machine's ability to reproduce sound, Aleksander’s creations include Mechanical Landscape with Bird – an extraordinary work for canaries, ‘serinette’, cylinder players and string quartet playing Stroh violins, Stroh viola and Stroh ‘Japanese Fiddle’. His work has also been featured in The Wire.

On a visit to London from his home in Chicago, Michael had already made an arrangement with Aleks to run an EVP recording session at the studio, which is an Aladdin’s cave of working cylinder players, amplifying horns for gramophones and radios, antique musical instruments, sheet music, pictures and shelves full of books and old recordings. You can get some idea of the fabulous clutter in the photographs above – although I will be posting some more detailed glimpses of the studio contents on the Found 0bjects blog in the next day or so.

The reason for my presence was a standing invitation from Aleks to make a wax cylinder of a reading from Welcome to Mars as part of his continuing archive of such recordings. This seemed like the perfect opportunity, especially since Michael and I had been in contact at the end of last year while I was writing my piece of Edison and ghosts for the January 2011 issue of The Wire. Michael was particularly intrigued by the presence of so many gramophone horns in the room, especially some of the larger, more elaborate ones hanging from the ceiling. ‘They remind me of the spirit horns that mediums would use at séances in the early part of the twentieth century,’ he observed. Once we had regained some of our composure after first entering this modernist wunderkammer, Michael and I tried to work out with Aleks what was the best way to proceed. I offered to step aside so they could get on with making EVP recordings. ‘Actually it would be better if you went first,’ Michael replied. ‘Your reading will warm the room up a bit and make it more responsive.’

But first the Edison machine itself had to be warmed up: I practised my short reading while Aleks switched on a lamp over the cylinder, set it spinning and waited for the wax to soften before a recording could take place. It had never occurred to me that the voice was inscribed into a soft substance – I always had an idea of it being carved out of something brittle and hard. My second misconception was over how to approach a horn rather than a microphone. Working with mikes, you want to keep your face back from it in order to avoid popping and paper rustling – and after two days of recording my recent Essay series for Radio 3, I was more aware of that than ever. Instead Aleks was constantly instructing to get my face as far into the horn as possible while still being able to read from the copy of Welcome to Mars I had brought with me – images of Jean Cocteau leaning forward reciting poetry into the elaborate horn megaphone in production stills for Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel filled my head as I struggled to keep the page in focus out of the corner of my right eye and read out loud at the same time.

Aleksander had also stipulated that I would have to speak very slowly and very clearly and enunciate every last syllable. The device, it turns out, really does have formality built into it: you find yourself addressing it, rather than some unseen audience. We recorded a two-minute cylinder, waited for it to cool down and then played it back on a separate machine mounted with a massive horn. I have never heard my voice sounding like that before – normally I cannot bear to hear it, but the grain that a cylinder recording brings introduces to your words makes them sound completely different – ‘other’. It does not copy, simulate or even echo you; it is a separate entity – something that comes from the machine and only from the machine. The clicks and pops formed an unexpected accompaniment to my delivery – I was enthralled by the whole thing.

Michael had been taking photographs all the way through my reading and added the occasional encouraging smile and thumbs-up sign as it unfolded. Aleksander was also pleased with the way the reading came out – and at some point it’s going to form part of an online archive of recordings featuring many different composers, writers and musicians. There will, of course, be more on this project posted here as and when information becomes available. Right now, however, it was time for Michael to prepare the room for his extraordinary EVP session. What happened next, however, really deserves a post of its own – and I shall be only too happy to supply you with it … soon.

Pictured above: KH recording an extract from ‘1947: Rebuilding Lemuria’, the first chapter of Welcome to Mars, pp 4-5, with Aleksander Kolkowski busy at the Edison phonograph: all photos taken by Michael Esposito.

In Memoriam: Paul Baran, 1926-2011

2011-03-29T17:46:00.001+01:00

Requiem for the Network

Catalyzing the Future

Requiem for the Network - Essay Five, ‘Heads in the Clouds’, Tonight

2011-03-25T09:13:00.003Z

‘Heads in the Clouds’, the fifth and final essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 25, at 23.00hrs.

A map of central Europe drawn up in the 12th century could still show post roads established five hundred years previously upon what remained of the old Roman road system. Since then technical engineering has increasingly shaped moments of social and cultural transition. From the earliest centralized networks, when all roads led to and from Rome, to the decentralized networks of the European Enlightenment all the way through the distributed networks of the nuclear age, our paths have never stayed the same for very long. The networks might soon be replaced by ‘cloud computing’, a method of data storage which will allow you to access data from any terminal, anywhere, at any time. The meteorological metaphor seems appropriate: as data becomes another constantly-shifting element in our global environment. But doesn’t being anywhere also mean being nowhere?

The Wire asked me to make a statement about ‘Requiem for the Network’, so here it is:

The aim of this series of short essays has been to develop new critical perspectives on the profound changes brought about by networks in human development – it was a theme I had been working on in a number of lectures I have been giving to postgraduate communication design students at Central St Martins and elsewhere. Networks are both a form of architecture and a communications medium at the same time, which can lead to some quite vague thinking with regard to their power and effects. It does not, therefore, surprise me that the Network – usually understood as the Internet – is being treated with the same cheery and enthusiastic innocence that greeted electronic media like TV, radio and computers in the 1960s. That’s why my series of talks takes the form of a requiem - to lay some of this more optimistic thinking to rest. I am not making this argument in order to disparage networks or to present them in negative terms - it’s too late for that in any case. I am presenting these talks in the hope that people will take the Network more seriously and think about its history and development a little more critically. The Network continues to change our lives, but we’re not really taking the time to understand how or why this is happening.

Essays one, two, three and four from the series are currently available from BBC i-Player - each one, however, will only be available for seven days after the date of original broadcast. Thanks for listening.

Pictured above: KH in the studio at Henry Wood House – Is that it? Can I go now?

Requiem for the Network - Essay Four, ‘I’ll Be Your Orange Juice’, Tonight

2011-03-24T09:15:00.000Z

‘I’ll Be Your Orange Juice’, the fourth essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 24, at 23.00hrs.

From spotting craters on Mars to identifying images in museum archives, it seems that there is no longer a problem that can’t be solved simply by throwing enough people at it. Social networks, online communities, multiplayer games, open-source projects and long-tail marketing are all examples of how the masses of the 20th century have been replaced by ‘the crowd’ of today. The networked ‘wisdom of crowds’ continues to evolve – from Second Life to MySpace and from Facebook to Twitter. These, however, are nothing compared to the personal relationships the netizen of the future will enter into with inanimate objects: RFID chips and complex barcodes embedded in products will allow you to interact with the contents of the supermarket shelf, establishing a social network of things. Don’t look now but that carton of orange juice just called you by name.

Essays one, two and three from the series are currently available from BBC i-Player - each one, however, will only be available for seven days after the date of original broadcast.

Pictured above: Producer Mark Burman at the controls during playback of talk number 4 in the ‘local radio’ studio at Henry Wood House, in the West End of London – so how ‘local’ is that exactly? Even Mark didn’t have an answer to that.

Requiem for the Network - Essay Three, ‘The Network Goes to War’, Tonight

2011-03-23T08:24:00.002Z

‘The Network Goes to War’, the third essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 23, at 23.00hrs.

In the 1945 Vannevar Bush, the head of US scientific research during World War II, wrote an essay called ‘As We May Think’ – it argued that, thanks to intricate mass-produced components, a whole new generation of communication devices would soon come into existence. By 1991 CNN was able to transmit a live commentary on the opening salvoes of Operation Desert Storm from the Baghdad Hilton. And even as the cable news network was in its ascendancy and Iraqi Command and Control became paralyzed, the public was also learning about a new communication system called the ‘Internet’ being used by Kuwaiti citizens to contact the outside world. From Sputnik to the development of the World Wide Web, the Cold War has provided an ideal climate for the network to flourish – with a little help from Neil McElroy, the man responsible for inventing the soap opera.

Essays one and two from the series are currently available from BBC i-Player - each one, however, will only be available for seven days after the date of original broadcast.

Pictured above: in the studio at Henry Wood House, London

Requiem for the Network - Essay Two, ‘Victorian Search Engines’, Tonight

2011-03-22T08:53:00.003Z

‘Victorian Search Engines’, the second essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 22, at 23.00hrs.

Sherlock Holmes had his gazetteers, almanacs and timetables; the City had its Stock Exchange, the Parisians had their pneumatiques and Morse had his code; the early telegraph wires followed the existing network of railways throughout the country, receiving, storing and sending on information. All these examples indicate not just ways of distributing data but also ways of thinking. This essay will not only look at the historical development of such networks and reasons behind it but also the extent to which our own thinking about networks has been influenced by the past. The early telephone system, for example, was used for the delivery of music into the Victorian home, thanks to devices like the Telharmonium, a mighty switchboard-operated instrument so heavy the floor beneath it had to be specially reinforced. And whoever thought the idea of music being relayed over a phone would ever catch on?

Pictured above: producer Mark Burman at the desk in the control room, KH in the studio, reflected in the glass partition between the two, recording the talks at Henry Wood House last week

Requiem for the Network - Essay One, ‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’, Tonight

2011-03-21T10:12:00.002Z

‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’, the first essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 21, at 23.00hrs. Information on its availability either on BBC iPlayer or as a podcast will be posted in due course.

Today the business and academic communities embrace the ‘networks’ with the same fervour they once showed the electronic media of the 1960s. Thanks to the internet they have the basic model for ‘crowd sourcing’, ‘data farming’ and other forms of research. Online communities of ‘netizens’ continue to multiply and flourish, offering new perspectives on consumption, relationships, political participation and mass communication. ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom,’ was once the watchword for an early phase in the Chinese Cultural Revolution – and look how that turned out. The networks today seem ubiquitous and omnipotent: but do they represent a cultural revolution or a total regime change? And what do we understand of their history or their power? Who and what, finally, do the networks connect us to? Welcome to the Labyrinth.

We set great store by the welcome we receive – we have usually travelled a great distance to get there. Today the welcome offers access to an increasingly ‘soft’ architecture of responsive environments, transparent barriers, audible directives, unseen electronic gateways, transportation systems and temporary spaces. The reverse face of this welcome, however, is the heightened security of body scanners and metal detectors, firewalls, ‘pay-walls’ and denial of service. The network becomes a labyrinth which we navigate like laboratory rats in a maze. Looking at basic configurations and definitions of the ‘network’, this essay looks at its development in terms of behaviourism, game theory and systems management. Perhaps the hardest labyrinth to get out of is the one you don’t even realize you are in.

Pictured above: in the studio at Henry Wood House, London

'Requiem for the Network' on BBC Radio 3

2011-03-19T09:47:00.001Z

Starting at 11.00 pm on Monday March 21 and continuing throughout the entire week, I shall be presenting ‘Requiem for the Network’, a sequence of five late-night talks on BBC Radio 3. The series explores how the network has extended the range of our senses but also compromised them.

As weaponry systems, commercial enterprises, banking and home entertainment draw increasingly upon the same operating platforms, the neutrality of the network is open to question. Perhaps the most appropriate model for understanding the enduring nature of the network is the Labyrinth: a structure of mystifying complexity where technology, deception and violence all meet. The US military, having been instrumental in developing the Internet, has now withdrawn into its own secret labyrinth, which it considers a safe environment for the transmission of classified data.

‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’ Monday March 21
‘Victorian Search Engines’ Tuesday March 22
‘The Network Goes to War’ Wednesday March 23
‘I’ll Be Your Orange Juice’ Thursday March 24
‘Heads in the Clouds’ Friday March 25

Each talk starts at 23.00 and lasts for fifteen minutes. Turn on, tune in – freak totally out.

Pictured above: in the studio at Henry Wood House, London

Just Some Guys Fooling Around With Unseen Forces

2011-03-14T18:07:00.004Z

Memories of a pleasant afternoon spent in the worshipful company of David Pescovitz of Boing Boing and Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor. The first copies of Strange Attractor Journal Four had just materialized, and we were in the mood to commemorate its arrival on this plane. You can see where we were. As to what we were doing…well, our lips must remain sealed. However, the pictures reproduced above should give you a few hints.

Homage to Japan – Catching Up With the Fukushima State of Emergency

2011-03-12T08:32:00.002Z

Illusions depend a great deal upon not being in full possession of the facts. To see the kaiju eiga genre as the obsession of a culture repeatedly rehearsing its unvoiced fears of nuclear obliteration or natural catastrophe is to explain little and to obscure a great deal more. It is also an attitude based upon a very selective view of Japan’s filmic output. For example, in the decade that witnessed the rise of Godzilla, films explicitly confronting Japan’s continuing nuclear nightmare, such as Kaneto’s Shindo’s Children of Hiroshima and Lucky Dragon No. 5, were also being released. Ishiro Honda himself had visited Hiroshima in 1946 and had wanted to convey in Gojira some of the horrors which he experienced there. Unfortunately, the film’s references to bomb shelters, Nagasaki and its pleas for nuclear disarmament were deleted from the English-language version by its American distributors. Godzilla, however, had already selected a very different target for himself. It was a disaster area still waiting to happen, and each time he returned to it, he became more a part of its future than its past.

By 1945, Allied air raids had reduced most of Tokyo to smoking embers. Its predominantly wooden buildings had burned easily, resulting in the destruction of three-quarters of a million houses and the deaths of 100,000 of the city’s inhabitants. A further three million were left homeless. Today, as well as being one of the principal centres of world economic activity, the greater Tokyo area also houses an astonishing 25% of Japan’s entire population. This vast urban sprawl has come to be regarded by many as the ultimate megalopolis: the first city of the 21st Century. The planners and engineers responsible for its safety have also described it as a ‘disaster amplification mechanism’: a term which could just as easily be applied to Godzilla himself.

There is, however, something both reassuring and unsettling about the Tokyo which Honda and Tsuburaya had Godzilla smash so repeatedly. It never changed. No matter how far into the future the films were set, Tokyo always returned looking the same. In a universe increasingly populated by alien invaders, female psychics, killer androids and giant mecha, Tokyo’s vast centre-less sprawl seemed to expand into time and space, eternally rising unchanged from its own rubble. The more Godzilla demolished it, the more it came back, determined to survive.

From Tokyo Must Be Destroyed: Dreams of Tall Buildings and Monsters, written after the Kobe Earthquake, 1995

Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm

2011-03-07T09:25:00.003Z

First published 1911 – the top entry in Susan Sontag’s ‘Random items which are part of the canon of Camp’ from her 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’.

And although I have had this image stored on my computer for some months now, I suddenly realize, having posted it, that we are back once again with a falling man, a woman and a balcony – some impressions are evidently harder to shake off than I had imagined.

‘But all fantasy should have a solid basis in reality; and to any young readers of the book it may seem that my presentment of Oxford life was a wild infraction of that law. Let me assure them that my fantasy was far more like to the old Oxford than was the old Oxford like to the place now besieged and invaded by Lord Nuffield’s armies.’ M.B. 1946

The Bell Labs ‘Secrecy System’ Vocoder Bible

2011-02-27T07:10:00.005Z

The above pictures were snapped onstage at the Palace Theatre in Whitstable, just prior to Dave Tompkins presentation at ‘Off The Page’ on the history of the Vocoder, as detailed in his book How to Wreck A Nice Beach. The ‘Vocoder Bible’, as Dave calls it, is a thickly bound collection of ‘secrecy system’ documents devoted to the development of the device at Bell Labs prior to WWII with redactions done by razor blade. The book contains memos typed onto tracing paper and actual blueprint schematics. Hastily photographing its pages under the strong glare of the stage lights made me feel a little like a spy from some Cold War intelligence agency – although the overall effect was probably more Maxwell Smart than Napoleon Solo in pop culture terms. Later Dave and I recorded a long conversation on the Vocoder, its history and its all-round strangeness, which is being edited at the moment and will be featured in the upcoming second series of ‘Hollingsville’, ~~due to start on April 6~~. More on the show and the new series as and when it comes up: for reasons of security, you are now required to eat this blog post.

Backstage with Dave Tompkins at ‘Off The Page’

2011-02-21T15:08:00.004Z

A much happier moment from last weekend was captured by Anne Hilde Neset backstage at the Playhouse Theatre on her i-Phone. While Dave Tompkins and I were in the dressing room, continuing our conversation from the night before, centring mostly around favourite moments from old horror movies, we were suddenly set upon by Mathilde Neset Young. Infant offspring of Rob Young and Anne Hilde Neset, Mathilde represents the ultra-new wave in music writing, combining the ability to discuss critical theory in both English and Norwegian with an overwhelming capacity for consuming lychees. All further discussion of Blood on Satan’s Claw, Frogs and Quatermass and the Pit ceased immediately: one has to respect youth in all its forms. About an hour later I was talking to a packed theatre about John Cage, and a couple hours after that Dave dominated the stage with his account of how his amazing book on the history of the Vocoder, How to Wreck A Nice Beach, came into being.

Pictured above from top to bottom: KH and DT with Mathilde; KH and DT without – Hello magazine should just give up now.

Catching Up With The Balcony Below Room 16

2011-02-16T10:55:00.005Z

It is hard to write a site report on ‘Off the Page’, which took place at Whistable, a small picturesque town on the Kent coast, over the weekend without mentioning one incident that was not related in any way to the festival but which has ended up overshadowing any recollection I may now have of it. And if that opening sentence sounds a little too much like the introduction to an M R James tale in which a guest at a hotel is troubled during the night by strange sounds coming from the room next door and then finds himself the next morning alone at breakfast, his nerves badly jangled, contemplating what actually happened, then I apologise; but that’s pretty much how it was. This series of posts has always been about the architecture of buildings I have recently visited: in it I try to treat them as if they were films or books or magazines that I have only just managed to catch up on. This post seems a little more immediate than that, however.

At around midnight of the first day of the festival, I left Jonny Trunk, Steve Beresford and Dave Tompkins chatting in the bar and went up to my room: I would have loved to stay in their company but was scheduled to give my talk on John Cage at 10.00 am the following morning so wanted to be rested for an early start. I cannot have been asleep for more than forty minutes before I heard a banging and scratching on my door. The following are the notes I wrote up immediately after what happened:

The guy woke me up about 1.00 am trying to force his way into my room - he’d mistaken the number – I was in 18 – turned out he was in 16 - like an idiot I actually opened the door and saw him off. He then started yelling at a woman who was already in his room: it was evident he was really drunk – he quietened down quickly though, kept up a steady stream of talk, rambling and very aggressive but as if his engine was about to run down. Then just before 2.00 he started getting very loud again and abusive towards the woman – by then she was crying and screaming and pleading. I couldn’t stand to hear that and do nothing so called down to the night manager – told him that things in the room next door were getting nasty. He came up, told the couple in room 16 that he’d called the police but I think it was a bluff at that stage – I heard him enter the room - the drunken man claimed he’d ‘just been asleep’ - things became extremely violent and heated after that - night manger badly beaten, out on the landing, making the most inhuman cries – sounded like the woman locked herself in bathroom, then came out again – the man throwing stuff around the room and swearing loudly – heavy violent banging against the wall – then a lot of very loud yelling and a window suddenly shattering - I thought it sounded as if he had thrown himself through it in a shower of broken glass – but later heard that he was pushed. I dialled emergency services on my mobile - it was about 2.20 am by then - said they should bring an ambulance and police - she said there was already a call logged in, but could I give them the correct address for the hotel, which I was able to do because I had the festival information pack on the bed next to me – even so, no one arrived before 3.00 - all that time the drunk is screaming ‘Ella! Ella! My leg’s hanging off I’m bleeding to death - call a fucking ambulance - anything’ – over and over again for a half hour – no choice but to sit in silence and listen, fingernails through the palms of my hands - then there were the voices of the ambulance crew on the balcony trying to lower him down to the street – they had to cut his trousers off his injured leg in order to reposition it – more screams and groans – the sound of broken glass being swept up – meanwhile a policewoman took Ella away – then a police patrol stopped by the room around 4.00 to check it over - and maybe I slept then for a little while or maybe I didn’t. I’m not sure.

I finally left my room around 8.00 am – saw the blood streaked down the door to room 16 and trailed across the landing carpet. Suddenly realized I had actually seen nothing but heard it all unfolding through the thin hotel walls. Went down to reception and asked after the night manager – the woman at reception had only arrived that morning so had no real idea of what had happened – she said he was badly beaten and still in hospital and that she had known him well and was very upset to hear what had happened to him. I mentioned the blood on the door and she said that it was still a crime scene - the forensic investigation van had just arrived - ash blonde woman with camera and sample cases. ‘Watch it or I’ll push you through the window,’ I heard one hotel staff member say to another. Saw Mark Fisher and his lovely wife Zoe in the corridor with their new baby ‘What? I didn’t hear anything,’ he said when I told him a little about what had happened. They were booked into a room on the other side of the building. ‘We were just worried about the baby crying and keeping everyone awake.’

Steve Beresford and Jonny Trunk were wandering around outside the hotel. What the hell happened? They’d both heard parts of the night’s events from their respective rooms. Most of the ‘Off the Page’ artists had been put up in the same hotel, so an account of the incident was slowly beginning to take shape. Green Gartside had seen the night manager after the assault, sitting downstairs, his face badly swollen. David Toop had been awoken by the breaking glass and the drunken fall.

‘He landed on the balcony next to mine,’ he exclaimed.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but he started out from the window next to mine.’

Pictured above: two views from my window of the balcony below Room 16 shortly after the police forensics officer had photographed it – note in the upper one the spare change that must have fallen from the drunken guy’s pockets when they cut his trousers off him.

‘Cage Post Cage’ Lecture at ‘Off the Page’ Festival

2011-02-09T15:01:00.005Z

In 1978, John Cage began an interview on the subject of music and its relationship to revolutionary action by expressing his shock and confusion at the mass suicide committed in Guyana by over 900 members of the People’s Temple, followers of the Reverend Jimmy Jones. Drained of his usual cheerful confidence in the future of humanity by this event, Cage stated that people seemed to be living their lives increasingly as if they existed within a work of fiction. This comment reflects more than simple disbelief or even perhaps the notion that such an event could be only the product of some monstrous triumph of the imagination. For Cage, the relationship between a self-destructive act committed on such a scale and the laws and forms through which language operates was an extremely close one. That so many people could, in a single night and at the command of one man, voluntarily swallow cyanide revealed not only that language does not communicate but that such communication is a myth and that ultimately language – in its present state – has the power to discipline and regiment human action and consciousness. Cage had already encapsulated this view some four years previously in his essay, ‘The Future of Music’: ‘Implicit in the use of words (when messages are put across) are training, government, enforcement and finally the military. Thoreau said that hearing a sentence he heard marching feet. Syntax, N. O. Brown told me, is the arrangement of the army.’ In social terms, this manifests itself most evidently in paternal authoritarianism; in order for us to remind ourselves just how the destructive the consequences of paternalism can be, it is perhaps enough to remark in this context that followers of Reverend Jimmy Jones constantly referred to him as ‘Dad’.

I am appearing this Saturday, February 11, at ‘Off The Page’, the first literary festival in the UK dedicated exclusively to music criticism. Taking place at the Playhouse Theatre, Whitstable, and hosted by Sound and Music in association with The Wire, this weekend-long event will feature a host of internationally-renowned critics, authors, musicians and artists discussing the current state of underground and experimental music in a programme of talks, presentations, panel discussions and workshops. My talk, which is scheduled for the ungodly hour of 10.00 in the morning, is titled ‘The Realization That We Possess Nothing’; and in it I will be looking at the shifting and still largely unexplored relationship between language, silence and music in the life and work of John Cage. Some the ideas and themes I will be addressing are also part of The Bright Labyrinth, the book I am currently working on. I can’t absolutely guarantee that it will be worth getting out of your bed at that time in the morning to hear it, but I shall at least try and keep things as quiet as possible. For a complete festival timetable and more details on other participants, ticket prices, travel and accommodation, check the Sound and Music site by clicking here; for a broader elucidation of the thinking behind ‘Off The Page’ from The Wire, please click here. Hope to see you there. Bring your own Flavor Aid.

Dead Fingers Talking

2011-02-05T11:44:00.001Z

The above are extracts taken from a short action sequence of pictures taken from the audience during my talk on Wednesday February 2 at the Corps/Machine seminary organized by ERG in Brussels. I had no idea that my hands were capable of thinking so much faster than the rest of me – which is perhaps why they also appear to have dissolved into some fleshly form of ectoplasm. My thanks to the organizers of this great event and to Sonny, my translator, who is shown sitting next to me onstage, for all her hard work during our long afternoon séance together.

‘Invading Present Time’ – A Lecture at ERG in Brussels

2011-01-30T10:12:00.005Z

‘the invisible brothers are invading present time’ – William Burroughs, ‘The Invisible Generation’, 1966

On Wednesday February 2 I shall be in Brussels giving a lecture at the Ecole de Recherche Graphique as part of their public symposium Corps/Machine.

From the 1950s into the 1960s and beyond, there was a tendency to read magnetic tape as an analogue for human identity as it existed in time. Individual experience became a recording that could be rewound, reviewed and, if necessary, rerecorded. Perhaps only a writer like William Burroughs would publicly contemplate how such processes might be transformed into an offensive weapon. Set against the impending threat of the nuclear blast, which irradiated much of his work, no technique was worthy of attention unless it could claim lives in some way. By equating word, image and virus as aspects of the same basic programme, Burroughs was able to formulate a project for social change by which past, present and future are forced to collide in a single moment of recognition

‘Invading Present Time’ will explore how advances in audiovisual technology transformed the suburban ‘pushbutton’ lounge in the West into a strategic space during the years of the Cold War. It will look at the attempts made by William Burroughs to transform the domestic tape recorder into a weapon, impacting bodies and behaviour, before examining the rise of Machine Code among teenage hackers in the 1970s and on towards the recombination of these elements into videogames such as Halo, America’s Army and Assassins Creed, together with their relationship to what Tim Lenoir has called ‘the military entertainment complex’.

The lecture is due to start at 14.30 hrs, so strap your body armour, on and I’ll see you inside the reality studio.

For further reading and information, see also:
‘Invading Present Time: the Politics of Simulation’
From Gameboy to Armageddon
Full Spectrum Dominator

Please note that a video of this lecture is now available on Vimeo: to view it, please click here.

Pictured above: Corps/Machine flyer; Nagra tape recorder, courtesy of Northern Paranormal Research

‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’: A Lecture on Design and Modern Thought

2011-01-23T12:02:00.003Z

On Wednesday January 26, I will be giving a lecture to BAGD students at Central St Martins based on some of the themes explored in the opening chapter to my forthcoming book, The Bright Labyrinth. Titled ‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’, the talk will take place in G12 at 16.15. I hope to see you then.

‘It is no longer possible simply to communicate a precise body of knowledge founded on a rigid status quo,’ wrote the architect Konrad Wachsman in The Turning Point of Building, first published in 1961. Recent advances in the real-time processing of information not only ensure that old hierarchical relationships between text, music and image are being dismantled but that newer hybrid forms are constantly coming into being. Our cities have become swirling clouds of unseen data. Reality becomes a videogame that runs itself. Not even the Minotaur is safe inside his Labyrinth.

As platforms shift into one another and design becomes more about the manipulation of sound and vision, language and movement, the standard disciplines and techniques blur together; forms become little more than confines, restrictive and anachronistic. Design is therefore unable to render itself transparent through the translation of modern thought. However, being able to see the network in the labyrinth and the labyrinth in the network, we can begin to develop a new series of attitudes towards research, making connections across disciplines that will ultimately inform and enrich our practice. With the power to give shape to what has hitherto only existed in the mind, design is modern thought.

Further research, links and reading material for this lecture can be found by clicking here. To read an extract from the first chapter of The Bright Labyrinth as it appeared in Journal #3, click here.

Pictured above: KH at the 2010 Frieze Art Fair, photo by Hana Tanimura

J.-K. Huysmans Against Nature

2011-01-17T08:44:00.002Z

A new translation of Á Rebours by Roger Baldick

This translation first published 1959

Found inside the book between pages 105 and 106: a London Transport bus ticket number 0573, route 105, stage boarded 09 – fare paid: seven pence.

Edison Speaks from Beyond the Grave

2011-01-07T10:38:00.000Z

And other marvels of the mechanical age:

In 2008 a BBC radio announcer made a personal apology to the family of deceased Hollywood screenwriter Abby Mann after dissolving into uncontrollable laughter while relaying details of his death on a morning news bulletin. The inappropriate hilarity had been provoked by the item immediately before it: a recording of a human voice made in 1860 had just been successfully reconstructed in a California sound laboratory, making it the earliest in human history. Registered by French typesetter Edouard Léon Scott de Martinville on a device of his own invention called a ‘phonautograph’, it had existed for almost 150 years as little more than the representation of a sound wave etched onto a sheet of soot-covered paper. Played back digitally in the twenty-first century using a ‘virtual stylus’, what had originally been picked up by the phonautograph as a rendition of the French folk song ‘Claire de Lune’ sounded in a BBC radio studio more like ‘a bee buzzing in a bottle’, sending the announcer into a barely-suppressed fit of the giggles. A spectral set of associations hold such moments together. The barely discernable voice retrieved from a smoky deposit with its accumulated cloud of a song; the dead writer’s obituary and a sense of time passed; even the historical overlay of different media upon each other, from script to the mechanical sound recording, cinema and broadcast radio: all work together to provoke precisely this kind of hysterical response. Ghosts can’t help themselves: they are always where they have to be, not where they want to be, calling out to us from somewhere beyond our own senses. To laugh, under these circumstances, is a useful means of expressing incomprehension – which, in itself, covers for a reluctance to believe.

The Wire writes: "Revisiting his family farm with Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Michael Esposito captured the sounds of his ancestors for their wax cylinder project, The Ghosts of Effingham. Ken Hollings spools back to the days of Thomas Edison to investigate how obsolete recording devices and the dead voices captured on them have changed our perceptions of the material world."

Buy it. Read it. Believe it.

Pictured above: the Ghosts of Effingham wax cylinder from Ash International; the cover for The Wire #323, January 2011

The New Year Comes...

2011-01-01T09:48:00.001Z

And nobody is home...

I have been working over most of the Christmas holidays, catching up on deadlines and finishing another chapter for my new book, The Bright Labyrinth. Regular posts should start appearing on this blog again very soon. In the meantime this is to wish you all a very happy 2011.

Pictured above: Vienna pension, April 2010

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy

2010-12-20T16:34:00.000Z

A Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera

Revised collectively by the ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’ Group of the Peking Opera Troup of Shanghai (July 1970 Script)

FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS

PEKING 1971

‘Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the revolution comes and is an important, indeed essential, fighting front in the general revolutionary front during the revolution.’

- Mao Tsetung

Reproduced above: front cover of the published script, complete with songs and production, plus Scene One, ‘Advancing in Victory’ – wishing a very happy Christmas indeed to all my readers.

Resonance 104.4fm Wins Radio Academy Award

2010-12-16T10:36:00.000Z

I have just been informed that Resonance 104.4fm, home from home to the ‘Hollingsville’ and ‘Welcome to Mars’ radio series, won the Radio Academy’s Nations & Regions Award for London last night – and for the second year running. The judges said: ‘We agree that the winner should be Resonance FM. The judges felt this was the type of radio to be admired and applauded. Experimental and unique with a clear focus and raison d’être. Anyone who thinks UK radio has become bland and homogenised should listen to Resonance FM. It revels in its eclecticism, champions creativity, experiments with sound, dares to take risks, celebrates London’s vast cultural diversity and brings true meaning to the word “variety,” because you genuinely have no idea what’s coming next. It offers a service not available anywhere else and London would be a poorer place without it.’

My congratulations to everyone involved.

Pictured above: KH at the microphone in the Resonance 104.4fm studio just seconds before TX, courtesy of roving shutterbug Kitty Keen

Found 0bjects Podcast Available Again

2010-12-11T10:02:00.003Z

When the first Found 0jects podcast was posted a couple of weeks ago, the demand for downloads swiftly exceeded bandwidth, which resulted in its unavailability for a while. It is now being hosted elsewhere and is available once again by clicking here. Many thanks to Dolly Dolly for setting up these new arrangements. This has been a public service announcement.

Pictured above: scenes from the podcast recording session (click on the honeycomb to activate); cover design for the 1964 Panther edition of The Dawn of Magic by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier: ‘Is the secret society destined to be the form of future government?’ – from the back-cover copy.

‘Hollingsville’ Christmas Lecture at CSM

2010-12-07T09:06:00.002Z

This Wednesday December 8 I am giving a special ‘Hollingsville’ presentation at Central St Martins for students on the MA Communication Design Course. An overview of the main themes and historical context of my recent book Welcome to Mars, ‘Lounge: Welcome to Disturbia’ looks at how space and sensory experience were profoundly altered with the rapid expansion of the Suburbs after World War II. Ranged in precise grids, connected to its own set of local amenities, suburbia became an isolated colony, a behavioural laboratory in which individuals were to be studied by a growing professional elite of social scientists. What they found was subsequently labelled by one psychiatrist as ‘Disturbia’: a place where audiovisual technology had invaded the already overheated environment of the modern home. Get ready for strange drugs, the even stranger tribal rites of the middle classes, flying saucers, radioactive mutants and teenagers from outer space! The lecture will take place in the MACD Main Studio on the Back Hill campus and starts at 10.00 am – admission is free.

Suggested reading:
Thomas Hine, Populuxe, Bloomsbury Press, 1989
Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music, A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong, Quartet Books, 1995
Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, MIT Press, 2007
Francesco Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica: Sounds Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation, Duke University Press, 2008

Pictured above: The 1956 Motorama ‘Kitchen of Tomorrow’

Fashion in Film Lecture

2010-11-30T08:43:00.007Z

On the evening of Wednesday, December 1, I am giving a short talk at the Horse Hospital as part of this year’s Fashion in Film Festival. I have been asked by the festival organizers not to go into any specifics about the event, so here is their press release instead, which should give you some idea what to expect:

Wednesday 1 December The Horse Hospital 19.00
total running time of films c.170min (with a short break in between).
Tickets £10, concessions £8
You absolutely must come dressed as your own madness if you wish to be admitted to the Fashion in Film Festival’s opening ceremony, a special film club night co-hosted exclusively for your pleasure by the brilliant Ken Hollings and a pair of London legends Princess Julia and Felicity Hayward. The evening will kick off with a mystery double bill screening featuring one of cinema’s greatest mavericks, plus a fiendish mix of lavish costumes and masks, dark rituals and a profusion of sequins and sparkles.
Post-screening, Princess Julia and Felicity Hayward will DJ into the night. Make sure to dress up to the nines for this unmissable event, the stranger the better… unless your madness is called normality.

‘London Noir’ Meets ‘Londres Noir’

2010-11-29T11:15:00.004Z

Asphalte Editions in Paris have just published a very fine French translation of London Noir, the anthology of stories based in and around the mother of all dark cities edited by my old friend Cathi Unsworth. Other contibutors include Barry Adamson, Max Decharne, Stewart Home, Ken Bruen and Martyn Waites. The Asphalte version is rather elegant, right down to the Jamie Reid colour scheme of the cover; and I am particularly pleased with how my story Betamax reads in French – in some ways I think I even prefer it to the original, particularly with regard to how the future tense works in this new version. You can find more details by clicking here. For those of you who still have to check out the original, available from Serpents Tail, you can order it by clicking here.

Found Objects Podcast Volume One Available Now

2010-11-27T10:01:00.005Z

We viewed the evening with alarm/the British Museum Tavern had lost its charm. Dolly Dolly said he wanted to record our conversation for a Found 0bjects podcast. The pub we eventually chanced upon was called The Angel and offered us divine protection from a cold and hostile night, full of strange voices and even stranger behaviour. We were soon joined by Glimmung and Dr Champagne, who both miraculously found their way through the dark and crowded West End streets – we had things to see and much to talk about. The resultant podcast, mixed and edited by Dolly Dolly, is now available to download by clicking here. There is also a visual supplement available here. My thanks and warmest appreciation to all involved.

Pictured above: Found 0bjects Podcast logo; The Morning of the Magicians, Granada Publishing Limited, Published in 1971 by Mayflower Books Ltd, 3 Upper St James Street, London W1R 4BP, First published in Great Britain by Anthony Gibbs and Phillips Limited 1963. Copyright © Editions Gallimard, Paris 1960 – cover artist unknown.

Of Men and Machines

2010-11-20T12:34:00.000Z

A fascinating invaluable anthology that probes deeply into the relationship between man and the machines he has created. Edited by Arthur O. Lewis Jr.
E.P.Dutton Co. Inc., New York
Copyright © 1963 Arthur O. Lewis Jr.
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

Cover design by Seymour Chwast

Ray Scott Vs ‘Hollingsville’

2010-11-16T09:58:00.002Z

Graham Massey, the official Hollingsville composer in residence, has sent me details of a recent event that took place in Manchester celebrating Ray Scott, founder of Manhattan Research Inc and the man who took Twinkies into Outer Space during the early 1960s. As well as a screening of Stan Warnow’s Ray Scott documentary Deconstructing Dad offering an intimate portrait of his father’s life and work, after which Warnow took part in a Q&A session with the audience, Graham and associates served up some tracks either recorded in, or inspired by, the Manhattan Research Inc studio. As the set list featured above indicates, the performance included live renditions of pieces already familiar to Hollingsville listeners. We remain, as always, on the cutting edge of the past.

Pictured above: the Manhattan Research Transfer Project set list and scenes from the performance, photographs supplied by Graham Massey

Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire

2010-11-13T12:47:00.002Z

A Panther Book
First published in Great Britain by Falcon Press (London) Limited 1946. Reprinted 1947. Panther edition published 1971

Cover illustration by Justin Todd

New Lecture Series Continues at Central St Martins

2010-11-08T12:09:00.002Z

From Wednesday, November 10, and for the next four weeks, I will be continuing my series of lectures in the MA Communication Design Main Studio at 10 Back Hill, Clerkenwell, EC1R 5AD. Each talk will reflect some aspect of my new book ‘The Bright Labyrinth: Sex, Death and Design in the Digital Regime’ as explored in ‘Hollingsville’, my weekly show for Resonance 104.4 FM. Each lecture starts at 10.00 am and will last an hour with the possibility of a discussion afterwards. All are welcome. The second four in the series are as follows:

Lecture Five – Spaces: Buildings Dream Too, November 10 – for a Hollingsville podcast on this subject, please click here.

Lecture Six – Events: The Birth of Chance, November 17 – for a Hollingsville podcast on this subject, please click here.

Lecture Seven – Trash: The Gasp between Clichés, November 24 – for a Hollingsville podcast on this subject, please click here.

Lecture Eight – Cognition: How to Pass the Turing Test, December 1 – no podcast is so far available on this subject.

Please check this blog regularly for updates and further details.

Laurie Lipton – The Mother of All Machinery

2010-11-06T11:01:00.000Z

My good friend Laurie Lipton has an exciting new show opening at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles this week. When she first told me about ‘Machine Punk’ during the summer I have to say it really got my wheels spinning, as I had been long been interested in documenting a sexual history of machines, which was also the subject of a lecture I gave at the Anti-Design Fair in September this year. With her customary excessive rigour, Laurie takes the collision of machinery and its deviants into completely new and extreme dimensions – all the more extraordinary for being painstakingly hand-rendered. After all, if machines really are extensions of our limbs and senses, then surely they should extend our neuroses as well? And would these neuroses not be present in every last little detail and fibre of our experience? Or to put it another way: never travel with your back to the engine. Those not in the vicinity of Hollywood Boulevard can preview the show online by clicking here. Learn to be afraid.

LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug

2010-11-03T07:26:00.012Z

G.P. PUTNAM’S-BERKELEY MEDALLION EDITION, JUNE 1966

Essays include: ‘Psychopharmacology: The Manipulation of the Mind’ by Humphrey Osmond, D.P.M, ‘Culture and The Individual’ by Aldous Huxley, ‘The Hallucinogens: A Reporter’s Objective View’ by Dan Wakefield,’ ‘A Visit to Inner Space’ by Alan Harrington, ‘How to Change Behavior’ by Timothy Leary, Ph.D. and ‘Points of Distinction between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs’ by William S. Burroughs.

‘U.S.80 Exotic County’ – Let No Man Come Back Alive

2010-10-28T12:18:00.003+01:00

Having recently posted something on Found 0bjects about Left London, their previous collaboration, now seems like a good moment to take a look at the latest offering from photographers Alexander Shields and William Eckersley to be published by Stucco Press. U.S. 80 Exotic Country follows a ragged route across America from Savannah in Georgia to San Diego in California: the first human highway to stretch from coast to coast and restlessly trafficking in people guns, drugs and gold – which is to say, history – for almost a century now. So what defines Exotic Country here? What fences it off? Separates the domestic from the alien? It’s a certain sense of isolation that arises when the energies of conquest and exploration have spent themselves across distance – the great push West is also towards exhaustion.

After the enclosed interior spaces of Left London come the wide open horizons of U.S. 80 – to pretty much the same disturbing effect. Once again Shields and Eckersley show great sensitivity for the abandoned and empty sapces – be they motel rooms or shacks, museums or concert halls, superhighways or parking courts. The civic search for the institutions of public life reveals only chaos, while the mythological search for a better life wears space down to nothing. Ruins multiply much more effectively in the open air.

The most startling feature about their newest collaboration are the portraits Shields and Eckersley present of individual people – holding handguns to their heads, hawking refund loans, carrying skateboards or simply standing around looking sharp. I was particularly surprised to discover one of my former students pictured among their number, sporting a repeating rifle and a shadowy mass of stubble and standing outside a California shack, looking a lot less lost than I remember him. I hope he will always remain that way. Order details for the book can be found by clicking here.

Dead Fingers Talk - William Burroughs

2010-10-25T15:44:00.006+01:00

First published in Great Britain by Calder and Boyars Ltd
Copyright (c) William Burroughs 1963
Tandem Editions 1966

‘Build it yourself obscenity kit... savage and funny attack on repressiveness of all kinds.’ Guardian, quoted on back cover

Photograph of the Author by Brion Gysin

Rubber stamp on title page identifies former owner as Michael Havers QC, 5 King’s Bench Walk, Temple EC4

Originally posted on Found 0bjects.

Ken Hollings on ResoVision

2010-10-22T07:20:00.000+01:00

It’s easy to like television but much harder to make it like you, I’ve discovered. The reason why television is such a delirious medium is that it entirely transforms you. You no longer have the protection of an isolated sensory impression to hide behind – as you can when presenting texts or conversation on radio or when recording an album. Nor can you entirely dissimulate yourself behind a live performance, which is the one forum that encourages you to act out a role, however natural it might appear to the audience. No, television demands a total transformation of the self into some kind of isolated other – not one sense, but all of them at once – not working together but completely against each other. You no longer know where to place your hands, or where to look – even the phrasing and punctuation of your thoughts seem oddly at odds with each other. Many thanks to the ResoVision staff for creating in real-time the retro chroma-key effects for my talk ‘The Whole World Is Watching: McLuhan, Marcuse and History – or Something’. Their efforts in the control room made it feel as if I were part of some early 70s BBC2 happening. McLuhan would have been proud.

Pictured above: four studies in online TV, KH goes all the way live, photos courtesy of ‘Hollingsville’ girl about town, Hana Tanimura.

Frieze Art Fair 2010: Look Away Now

2010-10-21T10:04:00.002+01:00

It was hard to believe we are ten years into a new millennium when wandering around this year’s Frieze Art Fair. There was no long perspective on display, except the endless lines of booths – only a sense of market fluctuations: a feeling that visitors carried with them from the ticket touts hawking ‘Frieze tickets’ outside Regent’s Park tube station to the exclusive Deutsche Bank hospitality offered to those who had the right passes. The step from one millennium to another is the work of a moment – barely the pop of a champagne cork – but the challenge it offers was already there in the period immediately leading up to it, and it still haunts us today. The truth is that, like all ghosts, this creeping sensation only manifests itself at inconvenient times – like at a crowded art fair, packed with people either deliberately looking away or simply staring in the wrong direction. The makeshift ResoVision studio, broadcasting 80 hours of live online television including the talk I was scheduled to give on the Sunday afternoon, seemed as good a vantage point as any to watch the great distraction unfold – and unfold it did.

Pictured above: Frieze Art Fair Logo seen from the exit side; Deutsche Bank welcomes you aboard; a Resonance reporter going undercover; Richard Thomas outside the ResoVision studio

ISTD ‘Talking Books’ Recollected

2010-10-19T11:48:00.007+01:00

I am indebted to Paulus M Dreibholz not only for these charming pictures of last week’s ‘Talking Books’ evening at the Russian Club Gallery but also for the invitation to take part in the first place. It was indeed a pleasure and an honour to address such a large and enthusiastic audience. The real interest for me, however, lay as always in the opportunity to talk about text with those who see it primarily as a design element, no more no less. It is true, as Fraser Muggeridge observed (recalling the words of Fluxus bibliographer Ulises Carrión), that writers do not produce books – they produce texts instead. Unfortunately, these texts mostly come freighted with literary forms that have adapted themselves all too readily to the conventions of the printed page. Writers do not so much produce texts as follow the rules of literary production, turning out novels, plays, poems or histories. What I find so refreshing about talking with typographers and graphic designers is that, from their perspective, the text has the potential to become another piece of information design. This is why Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body suggested itself so readily to as the subject of my talk: the simple agreement between the author, the editor and the designer to create a template, in which Brown could present his text as a series of self-contained aphorisms, each supported by its own individual bibliographic references, represents one of the cleanest and most elegant transformations of a text into a book I have ever encountered. There were brighter, more inventive and certainly more flamboyant publications on display that night, but none that held out the same promise – of collaboration between designers, writers and publishers to produce texts that no longer represent thought but express it instead. My thanks and appreciation to all who took part.

See also:
Love’s Body – Norman O. Brown
Norman O. Brown’s ‘Love’s Body’ at ISTD’s ‘Talking Books’ Stammtisch

Pictured above: the audience before the event (in the background KH in conversation with fellow speaker Hana Tanimura); view from the back of the hall; KH with hardcover and mass-market paperback editions of Love’s Body, both from 1966; (from left to right) fellow speakers Gary Bird (partially obscured) Caroline Roberts, Fraser Muggeridge and Gilmar Wendt in the front row.

ResoVision Debut at Frieze Art Fair

2010-10-16T09:32:00.003+01:00

On Sunday October 17 at 1.00 pm I shall be making my debut appearance on ResoVision, Resonance FM’s new television platform, which is making its first test transmissions from this year’s Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park. I am giving a talk entitled ‘The Whole World Is Watching’, which examines different contemporary perspectives on the electronic delirium of the 1960s, specifically those found in the writings of Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Marcuse. By connecting the two, I am hoping to contrast Herbert Marcuse the media theorist with Marshall McLuhan the radical philosopher. Or something.

I also hope to be joining Richard Thomas and his guests for a moment of ResoVision reflection at around 6.00 pm by way of a conclusion to the day’s events. Nothing is rehearsed; everything occupies its own time – even the mistakes. Resonance FM can be found at booth P12, so please come along if you happen to be in the vicinity – otherwise you can follow events by clicking here. Full schedule details of all ResoVision broadcasts can be found by clicking here.

Pictured above: KH at Phlight, photograph courtesy of Simon Tyszko

Love’s Body – Norman O. Brown

2010-10-14T09:59:00.003+01:00

Love’s Body

Copyright 1966 by Norman O Brown
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto
Manufactured in the United States of America
Vintage Books are published by Alfred A. Knopt Inc. and Random House, Inc
Random ketchup stain above the word ‘DEATH’ of unknown origin – my thanks and appreciation to all who attended last night’s ISTD ‘Talking Books’ event. The Pulp Modernism label is now active.

Norman O. Brown’s ‘Love’s Body’ at ISTD’s ‘Talking Books’ Stammtisch

2010-10-10T10:58:00.004+01:00

On Wednesday October 13 I will be giving a short talk on Norman O. Brown’s amazing 1966 volume Love’s Body as part of an event organized by International Society of Typographical Designers with the Helvetic Centre. Their ‘Talking Books’ Stammtisch is to coincide with the Most Beautiful Swiss Books exhibition, which has been touring since 2009, and features a number of writers and designers talking about their favourite book. I had no hesitation in selecting Love’s Body as my volume of choice – but you will have to attend the event to find out why: it is taking place at the Russian Club Gallery, 340 –344 Kingsland Road, London E8 4DA, and the whole event is due to start at 7.00 pm. See the flyer reproduced above or the appropriate Google Calendar entry elsewhere on this page for more details.

I am also using this post to announce a new feature on this blog. My talk on Love’s Body also marks the start of ‘Pulp Modernism’: a series of posts devoted to examples of fabulous paperback cover art from the 1950s through to the late 1970s – the truly great decades for mass-market sex, violence and intellectual splendour. I am indebted to Mark Fisher and Andy Sharp for framing the concept so marvellously during the course of the ‘Spaces’ episode in the original Hollingsville series on Resonance 104.4 FM. I’m not sure which of the two came up with the term first, but I do know who intends to exploit it ruthlessly from this point on – my thanks to them both.

‘Bright Labyrinth’ extract now available online in #3

2010-10-08T15:00:00.006+01:00

‘The welcome is a transitory ritual to which we are all long accustomed. Words of welcome indicate a point of entry where we might not otherwise detect one.’

According to a recent email from Hana Tanimura, the first issue of #3, a new journal she has co-founded and co-edits with Josh McNamara and Neal MacInnes dedicated to eradicating the dialectics of communication by adopting the ‘third position’. Alongside contributions from Zanele Muholi, Paolo Pedercini, and Kay Rose, among others, is an extract from my forthcoming book The Bright Labyrinth: Sex, Death and Design in the Digital Regime. Comprising the first five sections of the opening chapter, ‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’ should give you some idea of the feel and structure of the finished book. The journal itself looks fabulous, and I very pleased to have this early extract from the book to be available in this format. To download a PDF of the #3 please click here. A limited-edition print version of the issue will be available later in the year. Please check this blog for further announcements.

New Lecture Series at Central St Martins

2010-10-04T11:03:00.002+01:00

From this Wednesday, October 6, and for the next ten weeks, I will be presenting a new series of lectures in the MA Communication Design Main Studio at 10 Back Hill, Clerkenwell, EC1R 5AD. Each talk will reflect some aspect of my work over the past year in developing material for my new book ‘The Bright Labyrinth: Sex, Death and Design in the Digital Regime’ and exploring with invited guests on ‘Hollingsville’, my weekly show for Resonance 104.4 FM. Each lecture starts at 10.00 am and will last an hour with the possibility of a discussion afterwards. All are welcome. The first four in the series are as follows:

Lecture One – Media: The Extensions of God, October 6 – for a ‘Hollingsville’ podcast on this subject, please click here.

Lecture Two – Machines: History and Hardware, October 13 – for a ‘Hollingsville’ podcast on this subject, please click here.

Lecture Three – Networks: Welcome to the Labyrinth, October 20 – for a ‘Hollingsville’ podcast on this subject, please click here.

Lecture Four – Dreams: While the City Sleeps, November 3 – for a ‘Hollingsville’ podcast on this subject, please click here.

Please check this blog regularly for updates and further details.

‘How Not to Cook Book’ New Edition

2010-09-23T15:18:00.002+01:00

A new mainstream edition of my friend Aleksandra Mir’s art project The How Not to Cookbook, to which I am contributor (along with about 999 others, but that’s not important right now), has just come out. The contents are the same but the format is a little smaller than the previous editions; the cover is new and the price more affordable if you happen to order from the US - $16 at Amazon.
For more information please visit the How Not To... website, where you can read reviews, download samples with illustrations and follow the development of the project. ‘We are working hard on future titles,’ the How Not To... team report, ‘and would like to invite everyone, anywhere, all around the world to contribute advice on such various subjects as How Not To Romance; Parent, Sport, Nature, Art, Pet, Work, Travel, Live and Die. We like people from every walk of life to tell their story and give us advice of what NOT to do!’ This is public service for the public. Pass it on.

Publication details on the new edition:

The How Not to Cookbook
Second Edition, 2010

320 pages; 7.875 x 9.25".

Hardcover, approx $25

ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-3499-0

Published by:

Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.

300 Park Avenue South

New York, NY 10010

Indiebound

See also:
The How Not to Cook Book

Two Talks at the Anti-Design Festival

2010-09-18T10:41:00.002+01:00

I have been asked to deliver lectures on two separate evenings as part of the programme of events taking place during the Anti-Design Festival next week. On Monday September 20 ‘Towards a Sexual History of Machines’ reveals how Thomas Edison and Richard Wagner, Arthur Rimbaud and Franz Reuleaux, the Lumiere Brothers and Loie Fuller made us take leave of our senses: a lesson in how to listen to your own voice without losing your mind. Then on Tuesday September 21, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Trash’ argues that the madness of Ludwig II of Bavaria and Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and Morris Lapidus can never be recycled. The first evening has been curated by Cecilia Wee and the second by Richard Thomas of Resonance FM; both will take place between 7.00 pm and 10 pm at the same venue: Londonewcastle Project Space, 28 Redchurch Street, London E2 7DP. Admission is free. A PDF of the Anti-Design Festival guide can be downloaded by clicking here.

‘Timed to coincide and in partnership with the London Design Festival, the Anti-Design Festival is an initiative of Neville Brody, designer, Director of Research Studios and incoming Head of Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art, London. The Anti-Design Festival’s Performance Programme presents a panoply of experimental music, sound, moving image, spoken word, performance and digital practice by some of the most exciting artists working in the UK.’

Pictured above: the ADF performance area in its early stages of construction, photographs courtesy of Dani Admiss

‘Atomanotes’ Launch - With Lilian Lijn and Richard Strange

2010-09-16T08:38:00.004+01:00

Piece of Paper Press recently celebrated the launch of Lilian Lijn’s ‘Atomanotes’, the 25th publication in its series of limited-edition books made from a single A4 sheet, folded and collated into a personal billet doux sent free of charge by post. There are usually 150 copies of each title issued, and director of publications, Tony White made sure that everyone went home with one. In talking about her book to the assembled guests Liliane Lijn traced the origins of ‘Atomanotes’ back some 42 years to 1968, when she had been unable to find any scientists willing to answer the questions she was formulating about human and atomic behaviour – her ‘Atom Man Notes’ remained an incomplete project until now. Tony White’s recent post on the Piece of Paper Press site picks up the story:

The questions (prefaced with the note, ‘See human beings as atomic stuctures obeying the same laws as atoms’) include the following:
If each atom has a certain field of radiation then what kind of field does each structure called a human being have?
[...]
Imagine human beings travelling at the speed of light. Would we then have a stronger gravitational field? What if the mind could function, thoughts travel at that speed, would it exert a gravitational pull?
Now, finally, the questions have been answered by a number of scientists including John Vallerga, Laura Peticolas, John Bonnell and Ilan Roth. Their answers form the bulk of the text in Liliane’s new book. However, the small, roughly A7 format of Piece of Paper Press editions has forced a compression of that original working title to the single neologism ATOMANOTES.

The party itself took place at the Maggs Gallery, a former stable round the back of Berkley Square, its white walls hung with classic black-and-white portraits of William Burroughs from his glory days in Paris, plus some elegantly psychedelic poster art for the 1967 Equinox of the Gods and for the Castalia Foundation. Carl Williams, one of the chief crypt keepers at Maggs Rare Books, told me that seven boxes or so of Alexander Trocchi’s papers had been in the backroom just last week. Also present were a couple of ‘Hollingsville’ contributors, Steve Beard and Richard Strange, both of whom left before rainwater from the downpour outside started cascading in through the gallery ceiling, transforming the whole event into a small 1960s happening. Here’s to the next 25 sets of folded and collated A4 sheets.

From top to bottom: Picture 1: Ken Hollings and Richard Strange, Picture 2: L-R: Rosemary Bailey, Andrew Wilson, Liliane Lijn, Ken Hollings, copyright credit: Piece of Paper Press.

In Memoriam: Kevin McCarthy, 1914-2010

2010-09-14T17:01:00.002+01:00

Believe in miracles

Pictured above: Kevin McCarthy and Edie Sedgwick, courtesy of PCL LinkDump